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Who Likes Techno?/Pick of the Pops with Smashie and Nicey

Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield as Smashie and Nicey
  • Posted at 4:46pm
  • 03 October 2007
  • by SarahDempster-RT

“Who likes techno?” asked Who Likes Techno? (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 2 October), a polite, nervous little documentary that attempted to flog the history of drum machine-based dance music to the seething mass of modish excitability that is Radio 4’s lunchtime set.

Clearly, it was stuffed from the get-go. Squeezed into a slot normally reserved for heated debates about dead politicians and topsoil, its titular question fell into a small teapot of incongruity, splashed about for a bit, gurgled, then died. It might as well have asked listeners if they liked indecipherable hieroglyphics, or standing up too quickly after studying a granary cob on an unusually low shelf in a Parisian boulangerie.

Nice narrator Toby Amies did his best, but the confounding inappropriateness of it all soon began to grate. Crockery began to rattle irritably; cream scones raised their eyebrows suspiciously. Within minutes of Amies telling us, nicely, that techno started in Detroit, it had synthesizers in it, Germans made quite a lot of it and it was really rather good actually, there was jam on the dance floor. What did it want? Why was it here? And who, in the name of apparently legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles, was the blasted thing aimed at?

Was Doris from Chalfont St Demographic expected to experience some sort of Damascene conversion upon learning that techno is “party music, but party music that aspires to something more”? Would Today toff Edward “Ed” Stourton be so moved by the news that Inner City’s Big Fun constituted some sort of “mainstream breakthrough” he’d decide to replace his favourite silk cravat with a less expensive silk cravat and start shopping at – aciiieeeeeed! - Sainsbury’s instead of Waitrose? No.

Thankfully, less bewildering sounds – and less misguided “agendas” - were afoot on Radio 2. Here, among the kazoos and streamers that heralded the station’s 40th anniversary, we were met with the return of Smashie and Nicey, a momentous occasion that induced pangs of nostalgia in those of us who still pine for the quack-quack-oops of radio’s glory days. Sitting in for Dale Winton on Pick of the Pops (Sunday 30 September), Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse offered a reminder that theirs was a comedy strudel worth savouring.

Among the wilfully abysmal puns, the affectionate lampooning of pop’s old guard, the superb alliteration, the largely appalling music (the show counted down the top albums and singles from the final week of September 1967), the jokes about Nicey’s grumbling intestines (“Cover me, mate - I’m off to the bog!”), and the reckless droppin’ of ‘g’s, we learned that the times, they were a’ slightly changin’ for the former titans of the backstabtrocious Radio Fab FM.

Mike Smash (Whitehouse) was now rich, having profited from his “Bulgarian properdee pordfolio”, while Dave Nice (Enfield) was reduced to spinning discs at Penge ice rink while espousing political views as dodgy as his bowels (“To me, everything’s funny except immigration”). Otherwise, the song remained the same: Smashie is still a font of gurgling denial (“Pop-a-doodle-doo, great mate!”) and Nicey’s ego still hovers over Broadcasting House like the monolith out of 2001: a Space Odyssey (“That was the news and it was boring. I’m interesting. I’m Dave Nice”).

It was brilliant. And even the bits that weren’t that brilliant were at least 382 times more brilliant than Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul, suggesting it would be prudent – and, indeed, mungous - to remove the ageing DJs, permanently, from the box under Enfield’s bed, give them their own series – laughter track-free, preferably, à la their bafflingly overlooked, perfectly wonderful 1994 special, End of an Era - and let the bittersweet, Bachman-Turner Overdrive-related wondrousness unfurl. Pop-a-doodle-please?

*

Please note that Sarah will be back with a new Radio Ga Ga blog on Wednesday 17 October.

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