📺 How Good Was it Really: Little Britain 📺

[1101010]

@Yesiamaduck

I reckon the majority of the shows that have been pulled will be put back up with disclaimers plastered all over them.

HBO has removed Gone With the Wind and is preparing such a thing. I think it will come down to this because if they just go then Disney may start to feel the heat: Right now you have stuff like Peter Pan on there which we watched the other day and it’s just one racist horror after another (obviously lots of sexist stuff beyond mere period too). It shouldn’t really be on there but obviously Song of the South never got the foothold that Peter Pan did…

[1101010]

@Kallgeese

Now, now gentlemen, you’re both wrong. Sleeper don’t have any good songs!

Come on @anon19035908, let’s get 'im!

[Kallgeese]

[ttf]

I brought it up, I wouldn’t consider it as bad as some other things, but I would be really surprised if they did another lethal weapon one again. The show might have a clear ‘racism is bad’ stance, and for some that context justifies it, but others might have still the visceral reaction to seeing blackface and racial slurs and not think the people involved in the show don’t have the right to go there, so I think it is a hard one to call

[Owensmaterob]

@colinfilth

This is the change in social attitudes that has started to take hold in the last couple of decades and it’s surprising that these people haven’t worked that out

I think it’s worse than that; They know exactly what’s going on, and they don’t like it.

I’ve heard from multiple people that the League of Gentlemen live shows were full of pot-shots at ‘PC Culture’, and I think everything Ricky Gervais has said over the last few years has been an effort to position himself as being exempt from this kind of cultural reckoning. Even Dave Chappelle - often provocative/offensive, but usually a lot more thoughtful (and, more importantly, funny), has arguably spent his last few specials reconfiguring himself as someone who Tells It Like It Is To The Woke Brigade.

What’s really frustrating about DC in particular is that his last special arguably made some good points about performative allyship, but they’re lost among all the outdated 90s stereotypes and “gay” voices

[1101010]

If POTW was still active I’d nominate this one. Incredible!!!

[RoverHendrix]

Similar thing happened to my cousin when he went to a club dressed as a smurf. Had a lot of people coming up saying, “thats not on mate”

[dingaling]

Genuinely kept remembering the incident all last night and burst out laughing every time

[1101010]

(Oh god, I’m sorry for the length of this one guys, I just got into it.)

Not defensible but I the point of Papa Lazarou is that he’s a guy in blackface because their whole thing is that it’s meant to be a sort of backwards weird in-bred piece of England in LoG. So if he’d been green he’d have just been ‘bizarre’ but it wouldn’t have been about what the show was about, I guess.

Anyway, some stuff you just shouldn’t do. Lazarou is definitely an example of that. In their minds I guess they thought they were punching down at people who thought this sort of thing was okay (or I hope that was it).

It’s also sort of weird to think back to seeing this stuff and just assuming it was okay because I trusted the people doing it. I remember being deeply disturbed by both South Park and Ali-G as I felt both were examples of negative comedy. In the end I reasoned I was just old and out of touch (even at 25 hah hah) because people I respected said the joke was about something else.

I know it’s been mentioned that Ali-G was supposed to be taking the piss out of the likes of Tim Westwood but I think a key point here is that people did do that kind of level of Blackface (i.e. not literally painting their face but all the other markers there) so it’s impossible to know what we’re seeing here. It read just as much as a pisstake of black culture and I always felt it was a mealy-mouthed response to claim it was taking the piss out of white guys pretending to be black because… I dunno, it’s a lot to unpack but I think in many ways this is just about what working class or lower class culture always is, a melting pot. Middle class white guys wanting to be black is obviously going to be a thing but really that’s just about class tourism, and I’d say most of the people Ali-G was maybe spoofing were in fact just working class white guys living as urban working class people and really a reaction that this sort of pisstaking/punching down was ‘okay’ was actually closer to Kris Marshall’s racist shit about his own son, but at a wider cultural level.

[hip_young_gunslinger]

I haven’t checked but I don’t think Song of the South is on Disney+. Peter Pan is super racist though, and I can’t remember what the disclaimer says (aside from the tobacco use thing, which seems to be on everything. People loved their smoking).

[1101010]

The disclaimer is the same on all the old stuff - outdated cultural stereotypes and (yes) smoking too.

Maybe you’re right about Song of the South. I thought it had been buried but there’s a lot of dodgy mickey mouse stuff on there, yeah.

[dingaling]

Are League of Gentlemen finally cancelled, please say yes

[NoahVale]

A couple of ‘old’ comedy points

Fawlty Towers
There is a rant by The Major where he talks about taking a woman to see India… at The Oval. He uses the n-word and also the word ‘w*g’. The BBC seem to have softened their attitude to this and now issue a warning pre-showing to say that there is offensive/outdated language. The speech in question is interesting because it highlights the anachronistic behaviours of that generation and arguably has some merit for that.

Only Fools And Horses
There are a couple of instances of ‘outdated’ language e.g. Delboy referring to the corner shop as ‘The P*kis’.

Be interesting to see how they deal with these.

[1101010]

Fawlty Towers is always going to struggle around Manuel though.

[sadpunk]

Yeah, I properly loved it at the time, but it’s really problematic.

I never found the Babs stuff funny at all, but remember laughing like a drain at Pops and Papa Lazarou.

[Roy_Disco]

I find it odd that ‘w*g‘ is socially accepted in Australia (although with a different meaning). It’ll never stop jarring whenever I hear it.

[SenorDingDong]

Harry Enfield defends blackface and uses racial slur live on BBC radio

[Roughyed]

The further down you go reading that exchange the lower your head sinks to the table.

I did wonder how defensive comedians would get. Turns out an extreme amount. It also seems to be about something he did that I genuinely don’t remember him doing. It does seem to be that a few people are defending creations that didn’t make them famous it is a very odd hill to die on. Just apologise, understand why it is a offensive and don’t do it again. It isn’t fucking difficult.

[Tuna]

Say Rishi Sunak became prime minister, I would find it difficult that I would not be allowed to play him because of the colour of his skin.

JUST DON’T FUCKING PAINT YOURSELF
jfc

[he_2]

The film Trading Places, which I loved when I was a teenager, has Dan Ackroyd blacking up at one point as well.

The pre-warning seems to be more and more common now - I watched Dambusters recently and there was a pre-warning because Guy Gibson’s dog was named N-.

I read something yesterday where Walliams was saying that 15-20 years ago blackface was being seen within comedy circles as okay again and now attitudes have reverted to it being not acceptable anymore. It’s something I’ve always found discomforting whether in comedy or otherwise, it always felt very 1970s and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. The use of the ‘n-’ word by Ollie in the first series of The Thick of It really jars terribly.