Your say / Christmas
‘I’m looking forward to another sexist, racist, homophobic Christmas’
Everyone has their own festive rituals. For some, it’s all about gorging vast quantities of grub. Others prefer that guff about the Baby Jebus. Most of us will watch a Christmas film or two.
In my household – I refuse to use the term ‘family’, lest someone is tempted to stick a ‘hard-working’ in front of it; which the cat would consider an affront to his dignity – we always enjoy the greatest of all Dickens adaptations (The Muppet Christmas Carol, obviously) and the 1941 Tom and Jerry classic The Night Before Christmas.
But we never watch any live TV, partly because it’s all so awful and we have no interest in reality TV stars who are referred to only by their first names as though we’re supposed to know who they are.
is needed now More than ever
Our tradition is to return to the TV comedy we watched as children with our parents in the 1970s. The great thing about this stuff is that it’s all been released in unexpurgated form on DVD and/or blu-ray, which means Gen Z can’t get their nasty censoring hands on it on the grounds that it doesn’t – ghastly term alert! – ‘align with their values’.
Actually, my values are much the same as those of Gen Z but I prefer not to be performative about it. As something of a weirdo, I also don’t expect vintage comedy to reflect modern attitudes.
We’re heroically unburdened by children, which means we don’t run the risk of being cancelled in our own home. But nonetheless, we don’t gratuitously choose crap that would send the little prigs into a tizzy. No Love Thy Neighbour or It Ain’t Half Hot Mum for us.
And, of course, some classic TV comedy has nothing to offer the easily offended or professionally outraged. The blameless Morecambe and Wise is repeated regularly, as is the great Dad’s Army, which remains a ratings winner for the BBC. Lance Corporal Jones continues to get away with his references to the “fuzzy wuzzies”, presumably because the wokies don’t understand the reference.
Others are, to use another revolting modern term, more ‘problematic’. The surviving members of The Goodies have frequently complained that their show was never repeated, despite notching up vast audiences in the 1970s and famously causing one unfortunate bloke to laugh himself to death.
But re-watching those episodes today, it’s surprising how frequently the trio blacked up for laughs. While acknowledging that they wouldn’t do it now, Graeme Garden has pointed out that this was always done to satirise racism. It’s not an argument that’s likely to cut much ice in wokeworld
Occasionally you can get taken by surprise. Last year, we revisited The Two Ronnies, which regularly notched up Saturday night audiences of 18.5m back in the 70s.
There’s little to rile those who take it upon themselves to police our values here, apart from occasional leering at well-endowed ladies (mostly by Ronnie Barker) and some comedy cross-dressing. But that stuff was rife in 70s TV comedy.
Those familiar with the show will recall that it always opened with Barker and Ronnie Corbett sitting behind a desk reading out comic ‘news headlines’. In one of the early series, Barker tells an overtly racist joke – with racist language to match (I’m not going to repeat it here). The studio audience roars with laughter. Watching the show with my parents as a snot-nosed kid, I would certainly have laughed too (probably because I didn’t want to feel left out) without really knowing why I was laughing. Today, I just wince at the embarrassment of it.
The credits reveal that The Two Ronnies writers were such comic titans as Barry Cryer, Spike Milligan, David Nobbs, multiple moonlighting Pythons and ‘Gerald Wiley’ (i.e. Barker himself).
Even the crown jewels of British television comedy can fall foul of modern censors. John Cleese was rightly incandescent with rage when UKTV withdrew The Germans episode of Fawlty Towers from its streaming service, because someone, somewhere didn’t quite understand what was being made fun of.
But who remembers Mrs N-Word-Baiter – one of what Terry Jones used to describe as the ‘ratbags’ from Monty Python’s Flying Circus? The Pythons actually used the offending term and didn’t seek to coyly conceal it, as I have just done.
You’ll find her in episode two of series three (the one that features the legendary fish-slapping dance), originally broadcast in 1972. As portrayed by the saintly Michael Palin, she’s a hugely annoying character who addresses Mrs Shazam’s (Terry Jones) adult son John Cleese in baby talk even though Cleese’s character points out that he’s the minister for overseas development.
After waving a rattle in his face, she explodes. What’s bizarre about this sketch is that while it’s undeniably very funny, the humour is not enhanced in any way by the racist epithet.
Anyway, this year we’re doing the big one: Till Death Us Do Part. This is a show that’s deemed so massively offensive that the BBC will never broadcast it again unless it’s encased in a protective layer of ‘contextualisation’ supplied by all the usual hand-wringing suspects, lest we suspect the Corporation is endorsing the attitudes expressed.
But as played by Warren Mitchell, Johnny Speight’s Alf Garnett is one of the greatest comic creations of all time. The original Brexiteer, Alf is a working class bigot whose racism, misogyny and hatred of socialism were commonplace in the Enoch Powell era.
Trouble is that Speight’s caricature was so spot-on that all the real-life Alf Garnetts thought he was great. But the writer and actor can be no more held responsible for this phenomenon than Harry Enfield can be blamed for city traders adopting his Loadsamoney character and burning banknotes in the faces of homeless people.
I have only the vaguest memories of watching Till Death Us Do Part when it originally went out because it was considered highly controversial even in its day and consequently broadcast after my bedtime. Now you can get all the surviving episodes in a fabulous, completely uncensored DVD box set. I’m no Randy Scouse Git, but I can’t wait to get stuck in.
This is an opinion piece by Robin Askew, Bristol24/7’s Film Editor and author of The West’s Greatest Rock Shows 1963-1978
Main photo: BBC
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