The drive to improve representation of black and minority ethnic people on television has new urgency in the light of the Black Lives Matter protests, but it threatens to be derailed, some supporters argue, by an “idiotic” focus on removing the former work of popular entertainers such as Matt Lucas or Ant and Dec.
While the decision of television platforms to remove “vintage” entertainment shows, including Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh and The Dukes of Hazzard, has made headlines, a few leading BAME campaigners claim that retrospective censorship is a distraction.
A selection of offending shows have been dropped from archive streaming services including Netflix, UKTV, Britbox and BBC iPlayer, due to their use of “blackface” for comedic effect or because of racist attitudes ascribed to the characters. But writers Ayesha Hazarika and Sathnam Sanghera have both argued on social media that the “panic-erasing” of embarrassing programmes is not a substitute for commissioning BAME talent.
“This stuff is idiotic, and it will make the deep concern behind BLM seem like political correctness,” wrote Sanghera, author of a new book about the British imperial legacy, EmpireLand, out next year.
Both writers were responding to a UKTV decision, since reversed, to remove a well-known episode of the John Cleese comedy Fawlty Towers, The Germans, that features racist and xenophobic characters.
Today, the director of the arts organisation Black Cinema House, Jacqueline Stewart, called for audiences to continue to watch Gone with the Wind, the David O Selznick film of Margaret Mitchell’s saga of the southern states of America. HBO has removed the film temporarily to provide educational context. Stewart, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Chicago, said it was “precisely because of the ongoing, painful patterns of racial injustice and disregard for black lives that Gone with the Wind should stay in circulation and remain available for analysis and discussion”.
It is, she added, a prime text for examining expressions of white supremacy in popular culture, and illustrates how “trenchant racism has restricted black possibilities”.
For Lemn Sissay, the British poet and writer, the removal of offending TV shows has been welcome because he believes that, like the statues now toppled or under threat around Britain, they still shore up racist values that should not be tolerated.
“I spent my childhood grimacing through shows like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Love Thy Neighbour and even Rising Damp. Yes, all those nation-uniting, ‘event television’ comedies. Then I would go to school and hear those exact phrases spat at me with the justification that they ‘were on telly last night’,” Sissay told the Observer.
Armando Iannucci, the writer and director behind tv shows The Thick of It and Veep, called for the current enforced shutdown of the entertainment industry to be used to reboot the entire sector, giving much more work to BAME people on and off the screen after lockdown.
“It’s now and in the future where this will be resolved, so we’ve got to think about what we do once TV production opens up,” Iannucci told the Observer. “It’s up to directors, casting directors, producers and commissioners to cast from 100 per cent of the acting talent available to us. I’d hate to see more stories of amazing actors having to go to America to get a decent part.
“And the thing is, this doesn’t cost, it doesn’t require training, schemes, bursaries, investment (though all that is always welcome); it just requires looking at the fabulous amount of acting talent that’s out there.”
• This article was amended on 15 June 2020 to correct the spelling of the name of director David O Selznick.
