Sometimes reviled as a bitter TV reviewer, Victor Lewis Smith is a genuine one-off in the world of comedy. An ex-BBC radio producer, influenced by Jack Jackson and Kenny Everett (and an undeniable influence on Chris Morris), Lewis Smith has created, with writing partner Paul Sparks, some of the most astonishing radio and television ever broadcast. First reaching most people’s ears through his contributions to Radio 4's Loose Ends, Lewis Smith has subsequently brought us two series for Radio 1, did the funny bits in Channel 4's ill-fated Club X ('Buygones' and 'Up Your Arts'), some magical inserts in BBC2's TV Hell theme night and the Great Bore Of The Year Awards. His first TV series Inside Victor Lewis Smith was good but more recent works Ads Infinitum (BBC2) and TV Offal (C4) are the real thing.
1.
A 1989 Loose Ends sketch about Ipswich featured the line, ‘The only good thing to come out of Ipswich, apart from the road to London, was The Singing Postman, and even he was crap...’, but producer Ian Gardhouse edited out the following line: ‘...and now thankfully dead!’. The uncut version was broadcast as part of Lewis Smith’s Radio 1 Bank Holiday Special on 27/8/90.2.
Also on the subject of Loose Ends pieces, not only did Lewis Smith naughtily hide excerpts from the government-banned Spycatcher book within the tape winds that punctuated his pieces, but even managed to get the line ‘let me fucking go!’ onto Radio 4 at 10am on a Saturday morning (apparently unchecked). The piece in question, which featured Lewis Smith trying to get on as many death lists as possible and finally falling foul of Margaret Howard’s murder squad (hence the outburst) was repeated on a Loose Ends look-back-at-the-year-and-what-a-year-it’s-been show at the end of 1989, albeit with a much shorter edit, omitting the Howard section.
[NOTE: Lewis-Smith's Loose Ends contributions (of which there are dozens) have never been released commercially and the world is a poorer place for that.]
[NOTE (2): A Loose Ends book (Ebury Press 1988) was edited by Lewis Smith and Paul Sparks and featured some of his original contributions in script form. The book in question features few contributions from the rest of the team - Ned Sherrin simply writes a short intro, Stephen Fry's 'Donald Trefufis' monologues (now also published as part of his 'Paperweight' collection) appear to be transcripts from the original broadcasts and Emma Freud wastes everyone's time as always. This allows the reader to just enjoy Lewis Smith and Sparks' material as is. And bloody great it is too.]
3.
Lewis Smith’s first Radio 1 series (30/3/90 - 6/6/90) had a 30-minute timeslot, but the actual running time differed greatly from episode to episode, often allowing Alan Freeman’s Rock Show to start somewhat earlier than scheduled. This may have been down to censorship.
4.
A line describing Chinese take-away proprietor Mr Lão Tsu’ s food as ‘a mixture of thrice-regurgitated pig’s vomit...’ was cut short before its tag: ‘...and the stuff that’s left behind when they separate Siamese twins’ could corrupt the nation’s youth.
5.
His Radio 1 Esther Rantzen sketch (13/4/90) was subtly edited to disguise a Stephen Hawking-esque voice-box (‘this week’s star physically-challenged person’) from saying ‘Fuck off, you rat bag’, although, amusingly, the word ‘off’ was cut, rather than ‘fuck’. The full version, however, went out untampered in the end-of-series compilation.
6.
‘Esther’’s revelation that the pie she was proffering to her vox pop-ees contained ‘snot, bogies and broken glass’ originally also featured ‘dogshit’, but this ingredient was edited out. It does, however, feature on the 1991 Virgin CD/cassette release, Tested On Humans For Irritancy.
7.
Lewis Smith was under obligation by the BBC to ring back the victims of his phone hoaxes and garner their permission for them to be broadcast. One victim who refused to give his endorsement was Brian Sewell ‘[The call] entailed little else,’ explained Lewis Smith. ‘Although his mother did get involved at one stage.’ The call eventually surfaced on Tested On Humans For Irritancy.
8.
The second Radio 1 series (June - July 1992) experienced even more problems. One show was cut so short that the last six minutes of its slot were filled with two Bernard Cribbins songs (one of which, ‘Right Said Fred’, has been parodied by Lewis Smith on the previous week’s show. The series only ran to four shows, an odd come-down after the first series’ run of ten, not to mention his British Comedy Award for Best Radio Comedy the previous year (for the Xmas compilation The Best Of Victor Lewis Smith, beating The Mary Whitehouse Experience, The Million Pound Radio Show, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Dick Tarrant and The News Huddlines) in which even his speech, focusing on ‘Thalidomides and brain-dead controllers of Radio 1’ had been edited out of the TV coverage.
Notable censorship in the second series came in the form of bleeping out the names of people who may sue. The parody of Brit Awards ceremonies featured several references to Richard Stilgoe, but only one such reference (‘[His] name is an anagram of "I’m a smug self satisfied bastard who sucks up to Andrew Lloyd Webber"’) resulted in his name being bleeped, despite the fact that an almost identical insult formed part of the lyrics to a Stilgoe parody in a first-series show. Meanwhile, Dave Lee Travis’ name was bleeped from yet another piece about Ipswich in which it was claimed that people of said town regard him as ‘a living Ludwig Wittgenstein’.
9.
The final Victor Lewis Smith broadcast on Radio 1 was a Christmas compilation of the second series in which his parting shot made his bitterness quite clear - thanking his employers for their time, he referred to the then Radio 1 controller as ‘Johnny "I’m going to remove ten million hours of material from your show and then send you a letter asking why it’s not funny anymore" Beerling’.
10.
Lewis Smith's earlier TV work tended to be subject to snips and cuts. His contributions to BBC2’s TV Hell (31/8/92) were altered slightly, notably in his 'Credible Credits' piece where his voice-over dialogue was strategically dropped to an almost subliminal volume level during a section claiming that regional TV news is delighted by Rottweiller attacks (‘...we shall see, the nose is actually off. We’ll pretend to be shocked and appalled, but sod it - it’s the best bit of footage we’ve had at this TV station for years...’) under footage of the dogs in question barking loudly, and a non-too-subtle bit about You’ve Been Framed offering viewers £30 a clip and pocketing the rest of the £500, 000 production budget suffered the same fate - this time with the apocryphal figures disguised by fake audience laughter.
11.
In TV Offal (31/10/97 & 22/5/98 - 26/6/98), Lewis Smith intended to overdub a tuneless version of ‘Brown Sugar’ over footage of The Rolling Stones in the ‘Kamikaze Karaoke’ section. However, their publishers refused, stating that the band have a policy of not permitting use of their music in comedy shows. Lewis Smith was quick to condemn their po-facedness in his Evening Standard column.
[NOTE (1): It's always worth pondering on at exactly which point in media history comedians started getting screwed by music publishers. The Rolling Stones' publishers never seemed to object back when Kenny Everett used to do his parodies of Mick Jagger in the late 70s. The Barron Knights were 'comedy' performers in the 60s and often did Stones pastiches (with lyrics about them eating Christmas Pudding or something) which were credited accordingly. In the case of Lewis Smith it is doubtful that we would have been treated to the original 'Brown Sugar' on the soundtrack anyway – the sketch would probably have jumped straight to Victor’s overdubbing of that lovely video footage the BBC still owns of the song. The Stones' publishers obviously still exert an Allan Klein-esque indignancy (best illustrated by the incidence when Carter USM used one line from 'Ruby Tuesday' (sung differently) in their song 'After The Watershed' and were sued for 100% of the royalties).]
[NOTE: It was stated that the innuendo-sodden edition of Rainbow was the programme’s ‘pilot’. This was artistic licence on Lewis Smith’s part. In fact the show had been running for several years and the sequence was a privately-recorded spoof sketch intended for the amusement of the cast and crew and included on the 1976 Naff Productions Christmas Tape put together by Thames VT engineers. The same was true of the Bullseye ‘pilot’.
This is a full transcript of the unedited sketch as featured on the Christmas Tape:
WE HEAR THE ARSE END OF RAINBOW OPENING TITLES:
SONG: Paint the whole world with a rainbow…
GEORGE AND ZIPPY ARE PEELING A BANANA METICULOUSLY.
ZIPPY One skin… two skin… three skin… four…
GEORGE Zippy, where’s Bungle?
ZIPPY Oh, I think Geoffrey’s traying to get him up.
SHOT OF DOOR. WE HEAR BUNGLE AND GEOFFREY’S VOICES.
BUNGLE Oh, ahh, ah, I can’t get it in, Geoffrey.
GEOFFREY Well you managed it last night, Bungle.
BUNGLE Yes I know. Well let’s try it the other way around. Ohh, Geoffrey. Have you dropped one?
BUNGLE AND GEOFFREY EMERGE FROM THE DOOR. BUNGLE IS KNOCKING A WOODEN PEG TOY.
BUNGLE I’ve got it in.
ZIPPY Hello Bungle.
GEOFFREY Hello Zippy, Hello George. (TO CAMERA) Oh, hello. We’re going to talk about playing today.
BUNGLE Playing with each other, Geoffrey?
GEOFFREY Yes, Bungle. (TO CAMERA) Tell me, have you got a special friend that you like to play with?
GEORGE Geoffrey, yesterday, we played with our balls, didn’t we? Are we going to play with our friends’ balls today?
BUNGLE Yes. And we could play with our twangers as well.
GEOFFREY (TO CAMERA) Have you seen Bungle’s twanger?
ZIPPY I have. I showed him how to pluck with it, yes.
BUNGLE Yes. It’s my plucking instrument!
GEOFFREY Can you pluck like Bungle?
ZIPPY I can! I’m the best plucker here!
GEOFFREY Let’s get back to Bungle’s twanger.
BUNGLE Ooh Geoffrey, we could all paint our twangers, couldn’t we.
GEOFFREY Well, not now Bungle – it’s nearly time for us all to go.
BUNGLE Oh, but I’ve just been.
GEORGE I know – let’s sing that plucking song again.
BUNGLE Oh yes, and then Rod and Roger could get their instruments out. And Jane’s got two lovely maracas.
GEOFFREY Oh, what a smashing idea. (THEY CALL FOR JANE, ROD AND ROGER WHO EMERGE THROUGH THE DOOR).
ROGER We could hear you all banging away.
ROD Banging can be fun.
JANE Yes, and I was banging away all last night with Rod and Roger.
ROGER (DISPONDANTLY) Yes, but it broke my plucking instrument.
GEOFFREY Oh, never mind, Roger. Look, we’re all going to sing the plucking song. So come on, everybody – get your instruments out.
ROD (TO JANE) Do you want to blow my pipe while I’m twanging away?
JANE Oh no, Rod. I was blowing a lot with Rod and Roger last night. Would you like to play with my maracas?
ZIPPY No, let’s just pluck away with our twangers, yes.
BUNGLE Yes, it doesn’t matter what size your twanger is.
ZIPPY I’ve got a big red one.
GEORGE I’ve only got a tiny twanger, but it works well and I like to play with it.
GEOFFREY (TO CAMERA) Well, have you got your twangers out? Now remember, you can bounce your balls at the same time if you like. Or if you haven’t got any balls you can ask a friend if you can play with his. Right, come on then, let’s all sing the plucking song.
ZIPPY Right, are we all ready, one, two, three, pluck…
OMNES
Pluck, pluck, pluck away, we’re going to pluck
all day today
Pluck, pluck, pluck away, we’re going to
pluck all day
GEOFFREY It’s time for us all to go now but don’t forget to get your twangers out and play with your balls. We’ll see you soon. Bye.
ALL SAY GOODBYE, THE WAY THEY DO...
The same tape featured some great bits of Kenny Everett too, incidentally. We'll be taking a proper look at the comedic value of Christmas tapes in HIDDEN ARCHIVE soon...]
12. Lewis Smith has been known to re-edit his own material for effect. Listen to his prank phone calls - many lines have been pasted in afterwards, and this is obvious due to a slight change in the texture of the sound. The lines ‘Yeah, you couldn’t imitate that stuff, could you?’, ‘I’ve had a bit of a brain operation, Gavin’ and ‘I think I’m gonna kick the bucket’ (all from the Adrian Mills/Esther Rantzen call) have clearly been added in post-production.
[NOTE: In Ads Infinitum (9/11/98 - 18/12/98), we saw footage of Lewis Smith’s on-air phone call to shopping channel QVC. In this call (which had been broadcast live on the station), Lewis Smith told two camp chefs a joke about Ronald Reagan having Alzheimer’s Disease. However, a close look at the piece reveals that the footage is stalled during his speech: we get a few seconds in slow motion while Lewis Smith tells the joke, which switches back to normal speed as the chefs laugh. This was to accommodate an edit necessitated by a dull legal hassle, the details of which are not known to us.]
13.
In 1996, Associated Rediffusion distributed a cassette-only release called Nuisance Calls (ARTV 1256), available only through mail order. Compiled by Lewis Smith himself (and co-devised by him and Paul Sparks), the cassette mostly features hitherto untransmitted phone calls, although there are a couple of musical items which are possibly out-takes from the Radio 1 series. The tracklisting is as follows:
[NOTE: An asterisk denotes a call which, although untransmitted at the time of release, turned up in an edited/censored form in TV Offal.]
‘Winner Takes All’
‘Death In Crawley’
The ‘Funeral flowers’ phone
call, from the second Radio 1 series as transmitted.
‘Zena Lavaroni’
[sic]
Alternate edit of Hughie Green
phone call (without the ‘inserting the words ‘The
late...’’ joke). This features the only recorded example
of a VLS corpse.*
‘Do The Conger’
[sic]
Untransmitted phone call to
talent agency.
‘Incontinuity’
Uncensored version of
‘Tourette’s Syndrome’ phone call to BBC
Appointments, complete with ‘cunt’ and
‘cocksucker’.*
‘Whitehouse I’
Longer edit of phone call to Mary
Whitehouse.*
‘Put Me Up For The
Night’
The ‘Little Dead Tin
Messiahs’ from the second Radio 1 series, including a
previously unheard punchline.
‘In Bed With Derek
Nimmo’
Phone call to Derek Nimmo
with VLS asking Nimmo to announce the end of Side 1.*
‘Not Poodles’
The ‘Test to see if you’re
working-class’ phone call from the second Radio 1 series, as
transmitted but with the ‘Nikala is the root of Kylie’
mishearing cut out.
‘Medication’
Longer edit of phone call to the Guinness
Book Of Records office, without the ‘car crash’ ending.
Also features the chat with the receptionist. This is then followed
by a Record Breakers parody, presumably a Radio 1 out-take.
‘Cubism Crisis’
Alternate edit of the phone call to the art
gallery (from the first Radio 1 series), featuring a newly-recorded
series of expletives at the end.
‘Squibble’
Untransmitted phone call to Enoch Powell.
‘Old Four Eyes’
Sinatra parody, from second R1 series as
transmitted
‘Is Len In?’
Untransmitted phone call to Moscow
‘Whitehouse II’
Untransmitted phone call to Washington,
with VLS posing as Prof Stephen Hawking.
‘Winner Takes More’
Untransmitted phone call to Michael
Winner.
Nuisance Calls is available from Associated Rediffusion at the following address: ARTV, PO Box 6, Millom, Cumbria, LA19 5GA. Enclose a cheque for £8.99, made payable to ARTV.
14.
The sequence in TV Offal where a group of sinister schoolgirls sang ‘When Will The Queen Mother Die?’ was victim to censorship following these lines:
She’s survived three world wars
And lived through the Blitz
She’s survived a thousand
fishbones
That she
choked on at The Ritz
The word ‘Ritz’ was bleeped from the soundtrack and blanked out of the on-screen lyrics. The reason is fairly self-explanatory, although the legality may be complex: it is well-documented that the Queen Mother choked on a fishbone, but it is possible that the ‘Ritz’ reference was merely artistic licence on Lewis Smith’s part. Alternatively, if it was The Ritz that provided the offending dish, it may simply be the reference to a thousand fishbones’ that proved troubling.
15.
The seven original TV Offal shows (first series and pilot) were re-edited into four 25-minute compilations, broadcast 29/10/99 - 19/11/99. Legal problems prevented the programmes being re-transmitted in full, and several sinister omissions were evident - the most obvious being 'Did you fuck Lena Zavaroni?' from the Hughie Greene phone call (following Zavaroni's death a few months before transmission), and various visual alterations to the 'It's Nice Being Esther' song (among other things, the replacing of the final on-screen caption 'shit-head' with 'teeth').
‘…for’ bint…’
