Why does only political criticism work

 

Wondering over the internet the other day I found this article (one of many on the subject) by one of those millennials who having watched the first episode of Only Fools and Horses noticed there was some racism in it so she didn’t laugh.

In particular there’s a joke where Granddad keeps calling Sidney Poitier “Sidney Potter” when actually he’s watching a film with Harry Belafonte on one of his two tellys.  She incorrectly says the joke is Granddad mispronouncing the name … but really the joke was that Sidney Poitier was at the time about the only black actor allowed on the silver screen and even then Granddad has managed to anglify his surname.   

Is it a racist joke?   

Well, strictly speaking yes it is ...but it’s just a reflection of the time.  Alternative Comedy was embryonic at this time.  You had to be there to know what the world was like then…

“Make all the excuses you want, but three white men saying such things is completely uncomfortable and unnecessary.”

Perhaps, but on the other hand maybe you were born yesterday and maybe if you spent some money on some modern comedy or reviewed something that wasn't 40 years old or indeed, spent some money watching the later series which aren’t available on Netflix because the rights are more expensive you’d get a better overview of why this program became such a slow burning hit…  Netflix has some great stuff but ...

We've got some
half price old tripe
yes miles and miles of old titles
TV
Time freezed
Ancient documentaries
Star Treks
Poldarks
Costume Dramas
Fawlty Towers
And The Crown
And sexist 40 year-old jokes
From a mush in Shepherds Bush
Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush...

No PC then upon TV
No alternative comedy
Black or white, rich or poor
It was this or the testcard or...

Would a sit-com be allowed to be made like this today…?  Well, no it’s 1981.  For a start a program where all three main characters are male and the there are no female recurring characters for 5 years (excepting Marlene) probably wouldn’t be allowed today.  Then again having had my memory piqued I took another look back in time and watching the first three episodes again I had forgotten how much Del and Rodney talk about their mother – to the level that she’s almost an unseen character.  There’s hardly an episode in which this 17 year old bereavement isn't mentioned.  Indeed the very unpolitcally correctly named episode "Yellow Peril" in which Del paints a Chinese restaurant in luminous British Rail paint starts with the brothers on their annual pilgrimage to their sainted mother's grave. 

The author of the critical article also references Del saying “Chinese Japanese All the Same to me”.  Well, yes, but then that was a genuine playground rhyme of the time – usually performed while pulling the corners of the eyes into slanty positions… Not that this was a good thing but it was how things were.

A possibly redeeming quality is that Del’s prejudices often generate his own comeuppance.  I’m thinking particularly of the episode “Cash and Curry” where Del is conned out of £2000 by some Indian crooks who spin him an elaborate yarn about not being about to talk to each other due to the caste system and pretend they need them as a go-between.  When they abscond with the money and Del returns to the restaurant he thinks they owned he simply won’t believe that they weren’t the real owners.  When he asks the real owner if he remembers them visiting the restaurant before the owner replies “Sorry, but you all look the same to me.”

The other defence one can make is that at the time TV was ephemeral.  The technology didn’t exist to repeat things endlessly.  One time the BBC newsreaders went on strike and they repeated “Cash an Curry” to prevent having to put the testcard up.  I was so happy… it was the only way you got to see things like this again.  The sequence where David Jason falls down the steps and throws the statue in the air by accident, rolls over several times and still manages to catch it is a brilliant bit of slapstick made even funnier by the audience knowing the importance of the MacGuffin to the plot.

I’m not a huge OFAH fan but I think my favourite early episode is “The Russians Are Coming" where Del and Rodney lay their hands on a second hand nuclear shelter and decide to try seeing what it would be like to sit out the nuclear holocaust that the world could have ended in.  The bit where Lennard Pearce does his searing anti-war speech

“My brother George was at Passchendale. Nigh on half a million Allied troops died there, all for five miles of mud! I was at King’s Cross station when his regiment came home after the armistice. Most of them was carried off the train. I saw men with limbs missing, blind men – men who couldn’t breathe properly ‘cos their lungs had been shot to bits by mustard gas! While the nation celebrated they was hidden away in big grey buildings, far from the public gaze. I mean, courage like that could put you right off your victory dinner couldn’t it?  They promised us homes fit for heroes, they give us heroes fit for homes!”

This crude hatchet job is either lazy journalism or maybe the writer whose biography seems to involve a lot of education and internships just can’t relate to a time when people like Del and Rodney left school and went straight out to work.  Except, of course, there were 3 million unemployed so instead…

A small historical footnote.  The writer praises the theme tune.  Actually the original theme tune of Only Fools and horses was this dirge…

 

…it was retroactively changed at the insistence of John Sullivan.  Not everything starts brilliantly.  Failure is an important part of comedy.  Comedy needs to fail to evolve.  Of course, sometimes it just fails and, erm, fails but …

Next week the racist sight jokes in Harold Lloyd's Safety Last (I count at least 3)