Little Britain is ‘explicitly racist and outdated’. That’s the verdict of viewers asked by Ofcom to watch a 2003 sketch from the hit BBC show. Back in the noughties, millions tuned in each week to watch the abominable David Walliams and Matt Lucas dress up as characters with names like Ting Tong Macadangdang and Bubbles DeVere. It’s reassuring that, 20 years on, people appear to have finally found their senses and realised something that was obvious at the time: Little Britain isn’t funny. But there’s also something troubling about this revisionism of a show that many millions of Brits adored.
The episode that raised alarm bells for viewers in the Ofcom survey featured Walliams as university admin officer Linda Flint. The conceit of the sketch was that Linda (who we would now probably call a ‘Karen’) had to describe a student sat in her office to jog the memory of a colleague over the phone. While maintaining her solicitous demeanour she picked out a characteristic, to her victims’ obvious discomfort and distress, that any normal person wouldn’t say: they are fat or bald, they have a birthmark, they’re a woman with facial hair. In the offending sketch, she describes the ethnicity of an Asian character.
I found it offensive mostly because it was very bad
I found much of Little Britain unpalatable then, let alone now. After the surprise runaway success of its first series, its creators seemed to forget whatever finer points there had been in their characters and go straight for the obvious joke every time. (In the same way that the original joke of Alan Partridge – that he was normal, and everyone around him was strange – was swiftly forgotten.) More characters started to ‘black up’. The ‘Lou and Andy’ sketches turned into something totally different, and much less funny. A sketch featuring a mental patient called Anne now just feels incredibly cruel and pointlessly nasty. (Though interestingly, many of the ‘I’m A Lady’ sketches are interesting because they might as well be documentaries of some men’s behaviour that we are now expected to take seriously.)
I found it offensive mostly because it was very bad. But I also remember hearing from a friend that they’d seen kids on a bus shouting the name of Ting Tong Macadangdang, the Asian mail order bride ‘lady boy’ character, at a classmate of that ethnicity. Watching these sketches again, I’m even more stony-faced; I love bad taste, but this – unlike their close contemporaries in The Fast Show or The League Of Gentlemen – is just bad bad taste.
One of the reasons, perhaps, why the show has aged so badly is that it is a product of the noughties: a decade, like the 70s, whose cultural output can give people who weren’t there a skewed take on what they are seeing.
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The 70s was a societal crossover point where the openness of the sexual revolution crashed smack bang into the leery, beery crudeness of what the Americans call ‘locker room banter’. When people complain about sexism in old films and TV shows, they are more often than not referring to a very specific period – say about 1971 to 1976 with a few outliers – which was packed with cracking crumpet, birds with big knockers and men going ‘phwoarr!’ This period was a tiny blip, but we often hear younger people assume that everything was like that until about 2012. People forget that many rolled their eyes at it at the time, which is why – as with Little Britain – it flowered only very briefly.
Personally, I love the gaucheness of 70s shows. But when I sat down recently with a millennial chum to watch Carry On Abroad (1972), he didn’t get it at all, spluttering ‘But these jokes are terrible!’ as if that wasn’t the point.
Racially charged 70s sitcoms like Love Thy Neighbour and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum are also totally misunderstood. They both come from a very liberal place, despite their trappings. The latter is about the dismal fagged out, washed-up last gasp of the British Empire, and about how a motley gaggle of drag queens and their diverse chums are the future. It is positively progressive.
Seventies shows – in which those from the working class often formed a central part – also have something else to teach those who make contemporary shows. Comedy of that time still had the vestiges of a communitarian function; it was intended to soothe you after a hard day at a tough job, often a physically demanding one. It wasn’t witty and sophisticated. It brought the spirit of the knees up; something that has now sadly totally disappeared from our culture. A shame, as we could do with shows like this. But now comedy serves a different purpose.
Noughties TV shows – as shown by the backlash against Little Britain – are also in their own cultural silo. Many programmes in this period were a response to the ‘Down with Fatcha’ right on-ness of a lot of the 80s and 90s. In their own way, comedy shows in the 2000s were a small version of the bawdy Restoration Comedy after the Puritan era (which also got squashed out very quickly). It felt like we could relax, and laugh at characters like Linda Flint without getting too uptight.
We mustn’t forget that there is always something very funny about people saying the wrong thing. That is the joke, not the words used. To a miseducated 18-year-old in 2023, for whom the noughties will be a distant memory, Linda Flint – out of context – will just look like someone saying bad words and people laughing at them.
Older people don’t have that excuse. Ofcom reports that its study participants felt that ‘society had moved on’, as if Linda Flint was not clearly intended, in 2003, to be a grotesque anachronism. The whole point of the Flint sketches, what made them funny, was that society had ‘moved on’ and what she said was unacceptable.
As usual when people object to ‘dated’ comedy it’s an excuse to polish up their social status. ‘Society has moved on’ is often code for ‘we are terrified of the under-socialised middle class brats who have swallowed our culture’. It’s the kind of pomposity that needs to be skewered with a very broad, very vulgar, joke.
