Black-And-White TV    

2,214 words

-I don’t want to look at everything in black and white, but in America I gather blacks are sweeping the country.
-About the only job they can get. And very well they do it too.
Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, Beyond the Fringe, 1962

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of a British television show entitled Love Thy Neighbour. It was a low-budget situation comedy, and not especially funny when compared with the competition, but it has become more relevant as time has elapsed between 1970s Britain and today. The show ran from 1972 to 1976 over 53 episodes, not a bad return in a competitive market. It also featured a central theme unthinkable today but for that reason irresistible, and is a perfect example of the last culturally healthy decade Britain ever had.

Today, it’s not hard to find TV programs with a racially mixed cast, in fact it is probably harder to find a TV show or soap opera which does not feature blacks as well as whites, the former portrayed as sainted, the latter wretched. But imagine a situation comedy featuring two couples living next door to one another, one white and one West Indian, and who address one another as “nig-nogs”, “Sambo”, and “honkies”. If you can imagine that, you have imagined Love Thy Neighbour.

Eddie and Bill and their respective wives are neighbors in a typical suburb of London. Eddie is cast from the start as a white racist, Bill as a long-suffering black with a winning smile and an attractive wife (the white English couple are intentionally ugly). The wives get along famously, of course. Even then, women were the good guys on TV, as it were. Every episode rarely passes more than 30 seconds without a gag about Bill and Eddie’s different ethnicities. The pair break into a restaurant kitchen for some absurd and improbable reason, and the black man voices his fears that if they are caught they will go to jail. “That’s alright”, says Eddie. “They won’t be able to see you in the dark”. During the sitcom shenanigans that follow, Bill drops a hammer on Eddie’s foot, causing him to hop about in pain. Another character, coming across the pair, asks what Eddie is doing, and Bill explains about the hammer. “Oh”, says the new arrival to Eddie. “I thought you were teaching him a war-dance”. It’s breathtaking to watch today, and this is just the mild dialogue. Bill goads Eddie, whose riposte is that he wishes slavery hadn’t been abolished. I am surprised the show is still available online – there is a good compilation here – and I suspect it may not be for long. But there are two curious features of Love Thy Neighbour that foreshadow aspects of today’s racially aggravated and aggrieved culture (and that difference depends very much on your skin color).

Firstly, as with most drama today, Love Thy Neighbour is all about race. The perspective, however, is rather different. These shows were not propaganda, not some British version of Operation Mockingbird, but rather written to make people laugh (although I will revisit that statement, as it is not as straightforward as it seems). If this show was pitched to TV studio executives now, they wouldn’t throw the writers out. They’d have them thrown in jail. Secondly, it is invariably Eddie, the white man, who ends up looking foolish or stupid, and Bill who comes out on top as smarter or funnier or more capable. Both of these elements are present and correct in modern British television, of course, but the whole racial mood has changed. Then, it was funny. Now, whites are no longer laughing about race.

The 1970s were a golden age for British television comedy. There were so many brilliantly scripted, perfectly acted, and just plain funny shows to choose from: Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son, Fawlty Towers, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Only Fools and Horses, Porridge, Open All Hours. It’s rather sad now to look back on a decade when it was possible for white people to laugh both at non-whites and themselves. Looked at from half a century’s distance, and having watched all these shows at the time, I note a common thread, a word now familiar to all: racism.

When I use the term, I don’t mean it in its new incarnation. We live in a time, in the UK, in which the following things have been designated as racist at least once, and I haven’t made any of these up: milk, jogging, classical music, owning a dog, owning a cat, punctuality, Halloween costumes, asking a black “British” person where their family is from originally, Morris dancing, politeness, libraries, wearing a tie, blackboards in schools, ballet, chess, and the countryside. I keep expecting nuclear physicists to discover a new particle that is not somehow racist. But 1970s British sitcom was as racist – or, rather, racialist – as it gets. Perhaps the most famous example was set in London’s east end, then famously Jewish, now very much a micro-caliphate.

When racialism (as it was then correctly called) began to loom large in the British consciousness, two men represented this dreaded evil. One of them was real, and a famous politician, the other was a fictional character, a poor man in London’s east end. They were Enoch Powell and Alf Garnett. Till Death Us Do Part was a situation comedy which ran from 1965 to 1975, had a now legendary cast, and was written by Johnny Speight, one of the best British TV comedy writers of the era. One of the actors, Anthony Booth, had a little girl named Cherie, who would go on to marry Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Alf Garnett was, said writer Speight, an obvious satire of a working-class bigot, and Speight was somewhat disappointed when white British viewers took the old curmudgeon to their hearts. The language is shocking today not for its racism, but for the fact that lines such as these were broadcast at prime time just half a century ago. Considering pilfering at the local dockyards, Garnett pronounces that, “If you employ a bunch of coons you’ll get stealing, won’t you?”. The racial language is stronger than that of Love Thy Neighbour. Blacks are “coons” or “wogs”, and even Garnett’s liberal daughter calls them “blackies”, provoking the old man to seek Biblical authority for his prejudice. “There is nothing in this holy book here”, says Garnett, brandishing a Bible, “that says that God made blackies.”

Asians – in the British sense – also incur Garnett’s wrath. Spotting a Pakistani in his local pub, Garnett announces that the man would “look better in a fez” (despite that being Turkish apparel) before finding out that the man is his new neighbor. Again, it is always the white man who is twitted at every stage, and yet Leftist censors are unable to see this. It is only victimhood that registers on their color spectrum, not the fact that non-whites come out on top in practically every scene of these various shows. The Pakistani is, in fact, comedian Spike Milligan in outrageous boot-polish, and when he gives Garnett an Irish name as his own, Garnett calls him “Paki-Paddy”. Today, that would be a Non-Crime Hate Incident and would end most careers. In the credits to that particular episode, it reads that “The part of Spike Milligan was played by Paki-Paddy.” Milligan had form when it came to ridiculing the Pakistani accent, having performed a sketch on his own show involving Pakistani Daleks.

Garnett was egalitarian in his prejudice, and it wasn’t just blacks and Asians that incurred his scorn. Australians, Swedes, Germans, all of them were fair game. In criticizing the US, he manages to insult both blacks and American soldiers:

Course, your Russkies know that the only part of the American army what could fight was the coon part, ‘cos they was the only ones fit enough to fight. The rest were too fat.

Even the Jews were fair game, scarcely believable now. There is a running gag in the show that Garnett is Jewish. “They called me long-nose and Jew-boy and Ikey Moe,” he complains. “I had to sit next to a bloody black boy in one class.” Garnett has nothing against Jews, however. “It’s not their fault they’re Jewish”, he says. This gag mirrored Garnett’s own life, raised as he was in a Jewish family whose religion never interested him. Actor Warren Mitchell – famous for playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice as well as Garnett – became a noted atheist in his later years.

My personal favorite in the 1970s racist comedy stakes is It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, which I covered here. Set at the end of World War 2 in British colonial India (and later Burma), this is yet another example of a show branded racist when it is always the English who look foolish, and always the Indians who win out. This is what the Left will never understand. The British love to laugh at themselves as long as they can snigger at others while they are doing it. Blacks and Muslims do not have the innate ability to face ridicule from anyone outside their tribe.

Another popular show was Rising Damp, which centered around the lives of the tenants of a small and fairly impoverished block of apartments. Again, it features a white man full of bluster and bigotry, and a black man with a suave, university-educated accent, and whose black sexuality Rigsby fears. “What do you know about the normal way to attract women?”, he demands of the black. “Where you come from, you just give them a quick burst on the drums”.

Overtly racist language was not confined to sitcoms in the 70s. Stand-up comedians such as Bernard Manning, one of Britain’s top stand-ups, were even more brazen about racial epithets than Lenny Bruce. Some of his gags echo today in a more serious vein, such as his views on the naturalization of immigrants:

They think they’re British if they’re fookin’ born ‘ere. What, so if a dog’s born in a stable, it’s a horse, is it? I was in Bradford last week, I felt like a spot on a fookin’ domino.

Manning was also responsible for one of my favorite jokes:

Black fella walks into a pub with a parrot on his shoulder. Barman says, where did you get that? Parrot says, go to Africa, there’s fookin’ millions of ’em.

For the entirely predictable contemporary Leftist response to the wonderful, racist, sitcom 70s in the UK, we can rely on the ever-faithful VICE magazine. This piece, A Brief History of Britain’s Racist Sitcoms, scolds evil whites for laughing at shows designed to make people laugh:

Our questionable history of racist sitcoms are [sic] more than the embarrassing echo of distant history – they are a reminder of the stories we tell ourselves about our history, and of just how recently the British population thought the term ‘nig-nog’ was pretty funny, actually.

It was funny. Blacks found it funny too, because back then they hadn’t yet been taught that having a chip on your shoulder could pay off. And whites hadn’t been told to fear mentioning race in other than deferential terms. “When white people get together we have a good time, don’t we? We’ll have a lynching about midnight,” Manning says to rapturous laughter. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a rope in the car,” he quips. “Always carry a spare.”

It is not a question now of whether you would be able to make that kind of joke in a public space. Today’s question is how much jail time a white would get for re-tweeting it.

One of the sitcoms which really riles the British Left is something of a paradox. Mind Your Language takes place in a classroom in which new immigrants to Britain are trying to master the language of their hosts. “We’ll have no racialism in this class. Here, everyone is equal,” says the white teacher. The entire show, however, revolves around the slightly weary central gag of how funny foreigners sound when speaking English (at least, to the English). Greeks, Italians, Pakistanis and the Chinese are all ridiculed for their pronunciation, and there is even a fascinating altercation between a Japanese student and a German about the war, still a tender subject then.

Curiously, the biggest controversy of this period involving white racism on TV did not involve blacks but Germans. Fawlty Towers was the brainchild of Monty Python stalwart John Cleese, and in its mere 12 episodes featured an all-white cast. After a blow to the head has rendered hotel owner Basil Fawlty even more deranged than usual, Cleese famously insults a German family staying in his hotel by goose-stepping through the hotel lobby while reminding his staff not to mention the war. It became one of the UK’s most famous – and infamous – sketches, and is worth watching for Cleese’s blending of verbal and physical comedy.

British television in the 1970s was explicitly racist, gloriously so. A genuine racist like myself will enjoy many hours watching these shows, but we must always keep one eye on the fact that it was always the white man who was made to look stupid. Nothing like as stupid, however, as we look now these programs are being erased from our cultural history.