Norbert Smith: A Life
The film is presented as if it were an edition of the ITV arts programme The South Bank Show, commemorating the 80th birthday of Sir Norbert Smith, a celebrated British actor.
Melvyn Bragg, the real-life presenter of The South Bank Show, plays himself, visiting Sir Norbert at his home and encouraging him to reminisce about his past career.
Smith returns to more traditional roles by directing and starring in a series of Shakespeare productions for the stage and screen, including Hamlet (1949), with a screenplay "adapted in collaboration with Noël Coward".
This insinuation is confirmed by his next film, Dogs of Death in which he and his fellow veteran cast members—Richard Smashed, Dick Booze, Oliver Guinness, and Peter O'Pissed—drink heavily on set, even when the camera is rolling.
He then appears as a British butler in Martha (1983), and produces a biopic of Nelson Mandela, with Sir Norbert putting on blackface makeup for the title role.
closely follows the style of Will Hay's comedy films, with Smith filling in as the "Albert" character (played by Graham Moffatt in the originals).
The next few excerpts return to lampoons of general styles: They Called Him Stranger satirises low-budget British attempts at producing home-grown Westerns in Technicolor, and each of the Man of Music films follow the clichés of historical costume drama and composer biographies.
It’s Grim Up North spoofs the kitchen sink realism films of the early 1960s, with working class Northern English settings, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
The Head to Head interview parodies the TV series Face to Face, where interviewer John Freeman famously unsettled his guests by asking deeply personal questions; in the spoof Cyril Freebody throws insults rather than questions at Sir Norbert, e.g. "all the films you've been in have been total rubbish, and the last three made me physically vomit".
[10] In an Entertainment Weekly review, Ken Tucker described the film as an "agreeably silly little show-biz satire" and "a cross between Woody Allen's Zelig and Monty Python's Flying Circus".
[2] David Hiltbrand's review for People Magazine called it a "scabrously funny, mock-reverent look at the life and career of a venerable old actor" and a "marvelous jape.
"[10] Michael Hill, in The Baltimore Sun, highlighted the film's placement in the distinguished PBS series: "[The film] sounds like just the sort of self-important biography of an upper crust British actor you'd expect to find on PBS' Great Performances … [but] not only has Great Performances taken the highly unusual step of putting on something funny, it's actually poking fun at itself.
[12] Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight's Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, an academic study of mockumentaries, mentions that the film "parod[ies] both the archetypical narratives of [Smith's] acting generation and a wide range of British (and American) cinematic styles.
