Thanks to the wonder of some DVDs that Ava Alexis bought me for Christmas I have now re-watched the entirety of “It Aint Half Hot Mum” which has never been repeated by the BBC because it includes Windsor Davies liberally calling all the members of the concert party “poofs” and Michael Bates who grew up in India playing an obsequious Indian bearer called Ranji Ram in what some people have since described as “blackface” but Jimmy Perry described more diplomatically as a “light tan”. Having watched all the episodes sequentially I have to say the lightness of the tan depends very much on who was make up artist from week to week… the sweat patches on everyone’s uniforms seem to become less or more pronounced as the weeks go on too almost finally disappearing by the end...
Honestly, I didn’t really remember Bates’s character from original broadcast probably because he died after series 5 and I think I must have only started watching from series 6 when they have moved from India to Burma. It follows then that if the BBC’s rational for not repeating it ever is Bates performance that only actually puts the first 44 episodes as verboten for terrestrial broadcast… there are still a further 20 without Michael Bates that could be theoretically repeated? Perhaps there are other taboos surrounding British Empire adventures in India that make the BBC queasy… Along the way there are passing references to many fragments of now forgotten bits of Empire/Indian history …such as the Thug Cults, the Black Hole of Calcutta, Clive, the Indian Rope Trick … that probably are best forgotten and yet were once probably common knowledge to a certain generation but are now seldom mentioned except in Indiana Jones films. One has to wonder how contemporary audiences viewed them … but let’s not wander down that road today… I’ll leave that to "La-De-Dah" Gunner "Paderewski" Jonathan Graham with his degree from Oxford or Cambridge depending on which one the writers’ thought was funnier week by week…
Perry and Croft’s rational for casting Bates as an Indian was there were at the time not enough skilled Indian actors in the profession in England to cast and he spoke fluent Urdu. This seems to me to be a bit of a lame excuse. After all, there never will be if you don’t give anyone a chance making it bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy… How hard did they look? On the other hand, Bates is a really good actor and if one compares his performance as Ranji Ram to his performance as Blamire in “Last of the Summer Wine” it is really hard to recognise them as the same person. Not only has Bates let his beard grow and (“tanned up”? © Jimmy Perry) but his whole physical presence and body language is different. One can see the possible attraction for Bates in playing a more complex character like Ranji Ram after a lifetime of being cast as authoritarian bullies and there’s no doubt that his ability to convincingly speak Urdu helps sell the character. He also succeeds in making Ranji likeable which is no mean feat given the obsequious and devious character that is written. The central joke that Ranji perceives himself as British not Indian does wear a bit thin though by series 5 and there is of course always the worry that people are laughing at him and for the wrong reasons which is probably one reason the BBC are … Bates was fairly right wing. According to Peter Sallis during filming of the early series of “Last of the Summer Wine” Bates and Bill Owen were so near to their characters politically (far left and right) that “the series nearly didn’t get made” due to bitter arguments in rehearsals. A particularly interesting development in Perry and Croft’s writing is the use of Ranji Ram as a narrator who breaks the fourth wall at the beginning of each episode to introduce the plot and at the end of each episode usually with some homespun twaddle “old Indian” proverb. In some of the more ambitious storylines several two-part episodes are bridged with Rangi Ram laying out all the dilemmas facing the characters and encouraging us to “tune in next week for the next thrilling instalment” Dick Barton style. A device later used by Rene in Allo Allo…
Rangi’s sudden disappearance at the end of series 5 (Bates died) is never explained. Instead, Chai Wallah Muhammad (Dino Shafeek) who sells tea to the troops gets a bigger part – see there were some Indian actors after all. I remember being particularly moved as a child by the scene at the end of the penultimate episode where Muhammad waves goodbye to the concert party as the boat back to England takes them back home.
Barbar Bhatti the punkah wallah who pulls a string all day to keep the officers cool also mysteriously disappears for the last couple of series. I expect he got fed up with being kicked… Mainly he speaks complicated passages of Urdu which lapse into English in the last few words which constitute the punchline – a device since substantially employed by the Fast Show Channel 9 sketches and also to some extent by Rowley Birkin QC except that Bar is speaking real Urdu … perhaps now the technology is available they could provide subtitles…? His replacement is the Chinese Chef played by Andy Ho who in a reverse of this joke doesn’t actually speak any Chinese … of course one could criticise the characters as racial stereotypes but then all the characters a pretty much 2D stereotypes...
Possibly the most three dimensional is Windsor Davies as Battery Sergeant Major Tudor Bryn "Shut Up" Williams a man who is simultaneously at the pinnacle of his career and at the same time looking redundancy and obsolescence in the face for when the war ends so almost inevitably will his job… something that does eventually happen. His superiors – the pompous Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Arthur Digby St John Reynolds and the ineffectual Captain Jonathan Tarquin "Tippy" Ashwood are, like the concert party, also not professional soldiers but conscripts and also secretly harbour the desire for the avoidance of actual violence and danger. Indeed, it is the very real threat of death around the corner that pushes this sitcom into sometimes quite powerful emotional territory. When characters get a chance to leave the concert party for a better position there is always the moral dilemma that this would effectively mean the party being disbanded and their comrades being put in the path of mortal danger …although Bombardier Beaumont seems far more concerned by the “horrible creepy crawly things” that inhabit the jungle than the Japenese.
Having said all the above …to be fair to Jimmy Perry …perhaps there can’t have been that many Asian/Indian/Burmese actors in the UK as many Indian actors appear over and over again in the series in different small parts. Then again Croft used many of the same actors over and over again in his work and we also see a pre-Hi-de-Hi Jeffrey Holland (twice) and a pre-Allo Allo Gordon Kaye. Anyway, that’s the elephant in the room dealt with if you don’t count the memorable episode with the circus elephant which now wouldn’t be allowed. This got me wondering elephant intelligence …no one’s quite sure of their IQ but it seems they can recognise themselves in a mirror which makes them quite bright… or so it seems...
I’ve now written 1000 words without really getting onto Windsor Davies, Melvyn Hayyes and Don Esetelle who are the real stars of the show and I feel probably how the BBC Board of the Directors must feel… you have to write all this before you can even get started on trying to review it objectively… if that’s possible… It’s probably a problem too how Windsor Davies spends all his time calling the concert party poofs… but as Jimmy Perry used to say that was his real experience. The insult isn’t just directed at Melvyn Hayes transvestite Gloria character who is ironically promoted to Bombadier as he’s the only actual professional “artist” but at the whole concert party as much of their act involves dressing up in drag for “our boys” on their way to the front as there are no real women available – at least not British ones …although several of the soldiers have dalliances with the natives... In these days where the IDF has lots of women on the frontline dancing for TikTok for PR it’s easy to forget that in WWII all the frontline soldiers were men only some of whom dressed like contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race. An inevitable theme of the sitcom is the repression of femininity to make violence easier which could be seen as very topical relevant issue... One of the most amusing early episodes is where the concert party is booked to do a bit of moonlighting at a real commercial gig in a restaurant which would seem to be a front for a brothel. Competing against real women their act(s) not surprisingly go down like a lead balloon. With the exception of Gloria and George Layton’s character (a Bud Flannigan impersonator) who leaves after series 2 they’re all amateurs and a bit rubbish… Gunner Parkin the ventriloquist whose lips move, Nosher the paper tearer, MacIntosh the strong-man-who-can’t-quite-tear-a-telephone-directory-in-two, Nobby the bird impersonator … they’re the kind of acts that populate the bottom rungs of open mic circuit today… people who have an act but it can’t develop any further than five minutes… Apart from Gloria whose thespian/drag skills are debatable, the only members of the concert party with possible real talent/skill are (“huniversity heducated Gunner Greyham” © Windsor Davies) and Lofty with his remarkable baritone that booms unexpectedly from his tiny frame in the same way Susan Boyle’s voice/image clashed on Britiain’s Got Talent years later… the Top of the Tops performance of Whispering Grass in on the DVDs although it starts and ends rather suddenly as if that episode was compered by member of Operation Yewtree… Almost inevitably at one point they are threatened with the risk of being disbanded by the arrival of another act who can do everything (Jeffrey Holland – who also appears as a sex-starved solider)…
Particularly moving is the final episode where they all become civilians again. As they pass through the processing centre one of the characters complains to the man in the clothing store room issuing their demob suits that they’re not being treated like heroes to which the man (Bill Pertwee I think) memorably replies that there’s “no shortage of heroes round here”. For such is total war. WWI and WWII affected entire generations changing society on every level… and leaving many, many people with deep psychological scars. When I was a child such people were very much in evidence. Today, not so much. Perhaps that’s why war’s back in fashion…
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