On banning comedians
(Photo by Comic Relief/BBC Children in Need/Comic Relief via Getty Images)
One of the most disturbing TV sequences I have ever seen was of a young black comedian, in his mid-teens, on a talent show called New Faces. The year was 1975, a bad time for race relations in Britain. The young comic was desperate to please the white audience, making jokes about his own colour. The comedian, of course, was Lenny Henry. It was the beginning of a brilliant career but I still remember the price he had to pay then to win over that white audience.
Yesterday, 45 years on, the BBC announced that it would be removing Little Britain, one of the BBC’s most popular TV comedy shows in decades, because of a series of sketches in which David Walliams “blacked up”. The BBC, being the cowardly organisation it is now, did not balance these sketches against Walliams’s unforgettable impersonation of a white female bigot who was constantly the butt of all the jokes in those sketches, vomiting every time she encountered something that ran against her prejudiced view of the world.
Nor did the BBC balance the sketches they found offensive against the hugely liberating impact of Little Britain on a young generation who were encouraged to laugh with, not at, men who dressed as women. It felt a world away from Dick Emery camping it up in high heels, or Larry Grayson (“shut that door”).
In other words, comedy has always been complicated. If the BBC gets rid of Little Britain then logically it should also get rid of The Two Ronnies, in which Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett also “blacked up”; The League of Gentlemen, in which Papa Lazarou not only “blacked up” but traded white women, and yet was also one of the greatest comic creations I have ever seen on television; Till Death Us Do Part, of course, in which Alf Garnett, one of the most popular TV characters in 1960s and ‘70s Britain, talked openly of “coons”, the point being that the audience was invited to laugh at Garnett’s bigotry and to agree with his more liberal daughter and son-in-law, the face of a new tolerant Britain. Till Death Us Do Part was the model for Norman Lear’s hugely successful American comedy, All in the Family, where the bigoted Archie Bunker argues about the decline of America with his progressive daughter and son-in-law.
The difference is between those comedy shows which debated issues, or played off one kind of sketch against another, creating a debate within the series as a whole, and those which played to the audience’s prejudices. Trevor Griffiths’s play, Comedians, took on these issues and was first performed with Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Rea and Jimmy Jewel, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1975, the year Lenny Henry made his TV debut.
The larger point is who decides what shows should be banned and why? Statues can always be placed in museums to keep them away from the baying mob. But TV comedies? Where can they be kept safe? In the ’60s and ’70s, the children of West Indian immigrants experienced appalling racism. The children of East African Asian refugees were called “Pakis” in the playground. Terrible times. TV comedy reflected that racism, and it debated intolerance more astutely than more serious theatre. If you want to know what pre-Thatcher Britain was like, Bernard Manning and Alf Garnett were a better guide than David Hare or Howard Brenton, precisely because they were so bigoted.
Since the mid-1990s there has been an explosion of interest in old-time comedians: Terry Johnson’s affectionate tribute to Benny Hill (Dead Funny, 1994) and Cor, Blimey! (1998) about Sid James and Barbara Windsor; Channel 4’s documentary, When Steptoe Met Son (2002), Not Only But Always (2004) with Rhys Ifans as Peter Cook; Peter Morgan’s Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! (2006), with Michael Sheen as Williams and many more.
But these focused on the dark side of comedians’ lives, not on the dark side of Britain. Perhaps the time for that has come. What we shouldn’t do is airbrush out what we find offensive about the past and pretend that Britain in the 1960s and ’70s was an entirely decent, benign society. It wasn’t. That’s why we need comedy shows to remind us how offensive and nasty it was and often still is. Comedy has always been a serious business. Too serious to be left to TV executives running scared at Black Lives Matter protests.
