Ooh... that's dated badly

[Stumpy Pepys]

Barry Cryer summarised Walliams thus: "'He's a modern-day Florence Foster Jenkins. Everyone around him has been telling him he is funny. Let's be fair to him – he is a good swimmer."

Ouch!

[My Name Is Ian]

Since about October, I've been recording a podcast which has kind of turned into the subject of this thread. I'm endlessly fascinated by old TV, in no small part because there is no filter on it. There's no thought given to how anything might look in the future - if you watch a TV show from, say, 1975, you're watching 1975 talking to itself.

We've done 70-odd of these podcasts, and the overarching theme of them has been... holy shit. It's so much worse that I thought it was. Now, I'm not wet behind the ears with this sort of thing. I've been mildly obsessing over it since I was old enough to realise that the past is a foreign country. But the sheer volume of racism, misogyny and racism has been so much greeater than I was expecting.

Different genres of show aren't all created equal. News, current affairs and drama tend not to be so bad. Actually, current affairs more often not presents a pretty progressive worldview (shows like World In Action, for example), and where they do get things wrong, you can kind of feel that they're coming from a place of genuine concern or interest.

Light entertainment and comedy, though, are a different kettle of fish. It's fucking everywhere. Barely a show goes by without some reference or other of a dodgy number, and punching down is absolutely at the heart at most of the comedy. "Hilarious" accents are the order of the day, blacking up is far more common that I recalled, and women and gay people are really considered little more than something to be laughed at. Some personal lowlights:

- A sketch on The Russ Abbot show (the budget of which can be seen in the lavish sets apparently built for these weak end of the pier jokes) esstentially consisting of five minutes of telling Bella Emburg that she's fat, ugly, stupid and a woman (they're all considered as bad as each other).

- The most offensive thing on an episode of The Black & White Minstrel being Keith Harris's stand-up turns rather than the singers.

- Noel Edmonds using his primetime, early evening Saturday Roadshow as an opportunity to laugh at the USSR for an hour, including how hilarious it was that ordinary people had no food.

- In Sickness & Health, the follow up to Til Death Do Us Part, in which the tempering influence of Tony Booth's character is replaced by Arthur English playing someone who's about as racist as Alf Garnett.

- Jack Hargreaves being unspeakably patronising and horrible about travellers in Out of Town.

My personal lowlight so far, though, has been Copy Cats, a mid-1980s impressionists show featuring an appearance of Bobby Davro dressed as Hitler which is so crowbarred in that you can see the marks.

Outside of this, though, I don't think anything has really aged worse than Spike Milligan. When I was a teenager, Q had a semi-mythical status as the progenitor of Monty Python, and I used to wonder why it was never repeated on the TV. I ended up buying a compilation VHS and saw immediately why. It's *so* racist, to a level that shocked me in 1988.When I went back to it a couple of years ago I was even more horrified by it. It is - and this isn't a word that I use particularly often - disgusting.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Feel free to name it, I'd like to check it out and I'm sure others would too.

[G-Man]

Oh, I wish I had the time to listen to podcasts....

I love revisiting old German TV shows. The best game show of the 1970s -- and, in my view, of all time -- was the German version of The Generation Game, called Am Laufenden Band. It had incredible production values, and I rather enjoy its datedness, partly for reasons of nostalgia, and partly for the anthropology inherent in revisiting these time capsules. But, my fuck, Germans were fond of their stereotypes and loose with their casual racism. People seemed to find making "Chinese Eyes" the height of amusing.

Another thing that dates German TV shows is nudity. In the 1970s, it was all sexual-revolution-get-the-tits-out in the evening programmes (most famously Nastassja Kinski's on Tatort before she was 18). Today, the nation seems to be more prudish.

[My Name Is Ian]

Feel free to name it, I'd like to check it out and I'm sure others would too.

Sorry, it's here:

https://twohundredpercent.net/podcast


G-Man That "Chinese eyes" thing was extremely prevalent here, probably until at least the mid-1990s.

[Guy Profumo]

Yes, Griff replaced him from Series 2.

Without telling Langham, apparently.

[imp]

I once had a letter printed in the Zurich-based Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger about queuing. A reader had written in to complain at length that three non-white foreigners had pushed in front him at the supermarket. Surprised that a liberal paper would bother to print such shite, I wrote in to point out that they were probably just doing their best to integrate into Swiss society, given that in my experience none of the native population gave a fuck about forming a proper queue either, and that when you mentioned to some pusher-in that you'd been here before them, they always replied with, "Oh, I didn't see you." Very important issue. (The other time I had one printed was complaining that Grasshopper Zuerich increased ticket prices seven-fold when they got into the Champions League group stage, the gouging bastards.)

I found a lot of Little Britain very funny, though frau imp would spend much of the programme watching me laugh with a bemused expression. The grown-up man still breast-feeding, the projectile-vomiting racist woman at the garden fete, the teenager with a crush on his mate's gran, the strange shopkeeper shouting upstairs to his wife... I can see why some/many people would find it mortifying or embarrassing. I loved the absurdity of a lot of the set-ups.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Oh, I wish I had the time to listen to podcasts....
Another thing that dates German TV shows is nudity. In the 1970s, it was all sexual-revolution-get-the-tits-out in the evening programmes (most famously Nastassja Kinski's on Tatort before she was 18). Today, the nation seems to be more prudish.

Well, there is Naked Attraction (NSFW) on RTL II.

[kokamoa]

I once had a letter printed in the Zurich-based Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger about queuing. A reader had written in to complain at length that three non-white foreigners had pushed in front him at the supermarket. Surprised that a liberal paper would bother to print such shite, I wrote in to point out that they were probably just doing their best to integrate into Swiss society, given that in my experience none of the native population gave a fuck about forming a proper queue either, and that when you mentioned to some pusher-in that you'd been here before them, they always replied with, "Oh, I didn't see you." Very important issue. (The other time I had one printed was complaining that Grasshopper Zuerich increased ticket prices seven-fold when they got into the Champions League group stage, the gouging bastards.)

I found a lot of Little Britain very funny, though frau imp would spend much of the programme watching me laugh with a bemused expression. The grown-up man still breast-feeding, the projectile-vomiting racist woman at the garden fete, the teenager with a crush on his mate's gran, the strange shopkeeper shouting upstairs to his wife... I can see why some/many people would find it mortifying or embarrassing. I loved the absurdity of a lot of the set-ups.

I think the first series of Little Britain is very good. Lots of silliness and surrealness but then that got superseded by gross-out humour and all the idiosyncratic qualities of the first series got driven out of it.

[sw2borshch]

Oh, I wish I had the time to listen to podcasts....

I love revisiting old German TV shows. The best game show of the 1970s -- and, in my view, of all time -- was the German version of The Generation Game, called Am Laufenden Band. It had incredible production values, and I rather enjoy its datedness, partly for reasons of nostalgia, and partly for the anthropology inherent in revisiting these time capsules. But, my fuck, Germans were fond of their stereotypes and loose with their casual racism. People seemed to find making "Chinese Eyes" the height of amusing.

Another thing that dates German TV shows is nudity. In the 1970s, it was all sexual-revolution-get-the-tits-out in the evening programmes (most famously Nastassja Kinski's on Tatort before she was 18). Today, the nation seems to be more prudish.

I have spent many an hour the past couple of months on Friday and Saturday nights with a belly full of Weizen watching Ilja Richter on Disco 7x and his baffling skits.

[jwdd27]

Chris Langham started out writing for... Spike Milligan, which means he makes the list twice, for different reasons.

[Jon]

Chris Langham started out writing for... Spike Milligan, which means he makes the list twice, for different reasons.

I never knew that. I knew he was a writer on the Muppet show and appeared as a guest one week as the original guest they'd booked couldn't make it. That episode is one of the few that you can't watch on Disney plus.

[Jah Womble]

I spent a good chunk of my young life mystified as to who the hell the guests were on The Muppet Show.

At least I know I’d have shared the experience on that occasion.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

https://youtu.be/Y47h7gcHXI8

Curry and Chips. The first laugh is "well, being Irish, his Dad was probably too drunk to know who he was doing it to"... and unbelievably it soon gets worse.

[Benjm]

One of the worst old TV things that I have watched in recent years was an episode of Blankety Blank, all the more so for my having expected it to be benign nostalgia. One of the guests was Lenny Henry and it was from the period where he still felt pressured to make himself the butt of self-told racist jokes. Having read and heard him speak over the years about how painful he found that phase of his career added an extra dimension to the discomfort of seeing it now.

[MsD]

I liked the Spike Milligan dalek with the turban, just because it was so absurd and surreal, but not going to unpick it further.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I liked the Spike Milligan dalek with the turban, just because it was so absurd and surreal, but not going to unpick it further.

The surreality of that was that the housewife was married to a Dalek. Who came home from work and kept exterminating things. I still for the life of me don't understand why on earth Spike decided to make it 'funnier' by making it a 'Pakistani Dalek'. Was it just as the set up for the punchline "put it in the curry"? Which is funny, too, but why?

[MsD]

Pakistanis being famous for wearing turbans etc. *I think* I would have found it equally funny if it had been a Cockney or an Irish Dalek.

Really not going to die on the hill of the Pakistani Dalek so I'm out.

[Satchmo Distel]

I don't think Milligan had racist intentions with this particular sketch: it's just (from his POV) a set of funny juxtapositions and an excuse to blow up dogs, mother-in-laws and budgies.*

It "dates badly" because it would be read by a racist audience (which was the main audience in 1975) as Daleks = aliens = Pakistanis putting dogs in curries. And the audience would probably know that this same comedian starred in the undeniably racist "Curry and Chips", written by the same guy who wrote 'Til Death Us Do Part' which (despite Speight and Mitchell's stated intentions) clearly had the effect of encouraging thick racists - which again was the majority of the viewers - to see Garnett as a role model not a figure of ridicule.

*And anyone is perfectly entitled to find that funny on those terms without being guilty of being a racist by doing so.

[elguapo4]

Speight and Mitchell regularly complained that people got the various incarnations of Alf Garnett wrong , it didn't stop them writing and acting in them well into the 90s.

[Snake Plissken]

I'm not entirely sure that some of the audience misinterpreting something is necessarily the fault of the writers. Garnett was always the butt of the joke, the idiot, the one who fails. Speight and Mitchell did what they could.

(I'm trying to remember which comedy character (not Loadsamoney, or the Pub Landlord) a performer dropped because the audience were completely missing the point.)

[Gangster Octopus]

Stavros?

[Snake Plissken]

More recent, I think.

[Levin]

Was is Lee Nelson? Or is that wishful thinking on my part?

Milligan and Sellars both professed to have great affection for India and Indian people, Milligan especially as he was born there. It's strange then that their comedy that features Indian characters is not obviously different from what a racist would perform.

The Goon Show can be hilarious even 70 years on but there are large chunks that are terrible. Ray Ellington gets some punchlines but it's always about his race. And then you have stereotypical comedy voices by the rest of the cast.

I listened to the first series of Round the Horne recently and it has Kenneth Williams putting on a vocal yellowface performance in the running serial. No mention on BBC sounds that it might contain offensive material.

[My Name Is Ian]

Loadsamoney was killed off by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, run over on Comic Relief. I wondered whether Al Murray might have done the same for The Pub Landlord, but this doesn't seem to have been the case.

I'm not surprised that Christopher Langham was a writer for Milligan, since he appears in a couple of episodes of Q.