Another good example from the same period (1969) was "Curry & Chips", written by Johnny Speight and featuring Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan, the latter in the part of "Paki Paddy", a rather unusual character, being half Irish and half Pakistani, which I personally find quite funny to start with...

Again, Paki Paddy always got the better of his racist workmates, and that was indeed the whole point, which far too many people failed to notice, and the series was shelved after the first season.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_&_Chips

I generally think offense is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak, but at the same time prejudice and discrimination do exist, and treating racial matters is always walking on very thin ice.

Still, this was the 70s, a century ago... nowadays funny "ethnic" characters are often found in sitcoms without much uproar, also thanks to this old "pioneering" stuff, I think.

And another thing: why do we pay so much attention only when a different skin colour is involved? Racism begins at home, is another of my favourite comments on the matter...

Don't think Spanyards would be extremely pleased with the portrayal of Manuel in Fawlty Towers, for instance, and 'Allo 'Allo should have had the whole Continent raising up in arms against Britain, only it didn't.

It may sound silly, but watching comedy requires a bit of sense of humour, for Pete's sake...

No one could play that role better than Spike, born and raised in Asia, who had British citizenship denied to him when he came to live in England, which in turn brought his refusal of an O.B.E. and his taking Irish citizenship, later, without ever having set foot on the Emerald Isle, at the time.

BTW, although Johnny Speight wrote the show, the original idea for it was in fact Spike's.

As for Goodness Gracious Me, the restaurant sketch, known as "Going for an English", was voted among the top-ten best single sketches in British Comedy history (list follows, I know you're curious ), which goes to show A LOT about your actual average Briton's sense of humour!

If you can't laugh of yourself, you can laugh at nothing!

GGM, in fact, mostly had fun with the ways of second and third-generation Asian immigrants, rather than Britain itself.

Oh, and there was a nice Rowan Atkinson sketch, with him as an Indian restaurant manager dealing with a drunken lot of football fans after a match, who could indeed murder a curry, and more...

So, the best part of Britain DOES have a sense of humour, why is it, then, that the small part that doesn't is always in charge?


Top-10 best sketches (Radio Times poll, 2004)

1. Dead Parrot (Python)
2. Four Yorkshiremen (Python) [actually, the 1948 Show]
3. Lou and Andy by the Pool (Little Britain)
4. Going for an English (Goodness Gracious Me)
5. Brown baby (Harry Enfield)
6. Ministry of Silly Walks (Python)
7. One Leg Too Few (Dudley Moore) [Beyond the Fringe]
8. Papa Lazarou (League of Gentlemen)
9. Two Soups (Julie Walters in Victoria Wood)
10. The Spam Song (Python)

Maybe I wouldn't have gone for either Little Britain or the League in a list of classics, I think rather something from Not the 9 O'Clock News, Blackadder or the Young Ones, and surely the Two Ronnies' "Four Candles" is as classic as they get...

Love thy neighbour was rather on the edge, but one must remember its time zone and context,.

very funny then, but almost illegal now... times have changed.

I've read somewhere the comment of a spokesperson from BBC at the time, more or less something like...

"If you laugh with Alf Garnett you've been entertained, if you laugh at him you might have learned something as well... either way, Johnny Speight wins!"

Talking 'bout Speight and racism, I recently watched that TV movie he did, twice, in 1968 and 1974, with different directors and casts, "If There Weren't Any Blacks You'd Have to Invent Them".

Not quite comedy, sure, one does laugh at the surreal situations, at times, but it's bitter laughs.

I didn't look this up for the theme to start with, though, just wanted a chance to see Leonard Rossiter and Richard Beckinsale together one last time, with the added bonus of Bob Hoskins at his cockney best (1974 version), and I'm generally interested in Johnny Speight's work.

Very interesting, indeed, but I guess the reason they made it twice is that the script was too difficult to render visually, should have been taken out of its theatrical and rather claustrophobic ambience, but the budget for a TV movie at the time didn't stretch too much in the direction of location filming and special effects, I believe.

I'd like to see Terry Gilliam trying his hand at this, if it was to be remade for a third time, which I doubt, a lot of it would be outdated, even if the main topics (racism, war) remain unfortunately current...

Speaking of missed chances, and back to the main topic, I also recently watched the whole "Mind Your Language" series, which I found quite disappointing, exactly because it could and should have been so good...

I didn't find it racist at all, it did press on stereotypes, yes, but not necessarily negative ones and, once again, the English teacher often found himself to be the butt of the joke at the end of the episodes, and the "native minorities" took their share of the "brunt", too, see the cockney janitor...

But the writers themselves seem to have missed the point, here, and as soon as the main characters were estabilished, the plots veered toward traditional sitcom if not soap-like situations, the usual "comedy of misunderstanding" formula, losing all the potential to work with language itself, in the first place, and how it's perceived and "interpreted" by different cultures.

Well, Vince Powell is a well estabilished writer, and did several good things, but seldom with much of a spark of true inventiveness, and he also liked to recycle old gags a bit too much, perhaps...

Here I found one, man trying to bribe a police officer at the station with the old fiver in the driving license trick, which he'd used at least twice more, before, with Sid James in "Bless This House", and after, with David Jason in "A Sharp Intake of Breath".

And that's one worth "discovering" too, btw, David Jason with Richard Wilson and Alun Armstrong as his tormentors... unfortunately, Sir David has apparently vetoed the DVD publication of this, for reasons of his own, but it's a pity, what I've seen of it is quite good, much better than the more celebrated, but also mostly invisible "The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs".

Couldn't agree more!


Can't quite agree there, though... As quoted above, Alf Garnett is equally liked, as a character, by people who agree or disagree with his "views", and a lot of it is due to the fantastic performance offered by Warren Mitchell, yes, but also by Johnny Speight giving a "fair" rendition of the type, another characteristic of his writing, we are perhaps influenced by knowing where Speight comes from himself, political-wise, but his bigot characters are never merely caricatural, the butt of jokes, they're frighteningly real, I know Alf Garnett myself, he's my next-door neighbour, he's my uncle (acquired by marriage, not a blood relation, I hasten to add... )...

Johnny gives us an "angle" to view all this, yes, but he doesn't drop a judgement from high above, he more or less leaves us on our own on what to make out of it all, imho.


I basically agree on the latter, in general terms, but, again, I take one exception: don't believe Johnny Speight could be framed as a "smuggler" of bigotism himself, his aim was controversy, discussion, argument, and his way to obtain that was indeed someone like Alf Garnett, a "real" character, not at all one-dimensional, someone with whom we have to come to terms with in real life, sooner or later, someone whom we might actually LIKE, even, because, when he's not talking politics, he's a funny old geezer and pleasant company... just like my uncle, really, except when he's had a few...

What makes a sitcom racist?

Rudolph Walker, the black guy from "Love Thy Neighbour" has said it was NOT racist, but it is the critics who are - for one simple reason - NOBODY has ever said HIS character was racist, yet apparently, according to him, he made MORE racist insults about the white man, than the white man did about him, so the black character is the most racist, yet he says nobody ever says that, which means they do not understand what 'racist' means, or are themselves racist in not thinking black people can be racist too.

To be racist, it needs to be preaching a hatred against a particular race.  Just complaining about a specific use of language implies racism from the viewer as they are saying that people of that race are unable to laugh at themselves! 

It does not, to me, make the writers racist.  For example, in Steptoe, it would be unrealistic if the characters were NOT racist.  So being great writers, Ray and ALan adopt this for the characters.  That does not make them racist (and in fact if you study Steptoe the characters are not really racist, just ignorant). 

One bit of Steptoe most commonly named 'racist' is the word 'Wog'.  Let us not forget, this was first used in Parliament by WINSTON CHURCHILL and means 'Ward of Government', which is anyone who is assisted by the government, so an asylum seeker, or an english person on the dole.  It was only ignorant viewers who made the word apply only to the colour of skin.

I assume then if comedy is not meant to tackle this, you also object to the reverse, where the black or asian characters are racist to the white characters?  Because racism must be wrong regardless of who it is about. 

Hi philglass, yes of course I would  - racism is racism no matter who it is directed at - black, white, asian etc. I have never understood the term "reverse racism."

I wouldn't agree that to be racist, hatred of a particular race must be preached. I suggest that racism can be outright or very subtle. All words have both a denotation and a connotation, and over time connotations can and do change. For example, while the origins of the word wog may have once had neutral connotations, it is rarely used in positive or even neutral terms these days.

I can't comment on Steptoe, but Love Thy Neighbour simply wasn't to my taste because I just don't find the subject matter funny even if the writer's intentions were good .

Anyhow, guess we will just have to agree to disagree on this one, but I am thinking I need to perhaps watch a few of these episodes again in case I have missed something as perhaps what I picked up on in my twenties will be different to what I will pick up on at the grand old age of 44