Now in its fifth series, Citizen Khan will be back on our screens tonight. On its rationale, the show’s creator, the British Asian Muslim Adil Ray, has explained: “Growing up in a Muslim family in the 1970s and 80s I rarely saw families like ours on TV.”
This sounds right up my alley, but I’m afraid what I’ve seen of the new series again fails to deliver. The show’s parading of borderline racist stereotypes is stuck in a 70s groove. The style of humour belongs several aeons ago. It’s cut from the same comedy cloth as Jim Davidson, Mind Your Language and Mixed Blessings – all my worst televisual nightmares rolled into one.
As an everyday story of Pakistani family mores, Citizen Khan is a sitcom with a “current” setting. Someone who had just awoken after four decades of deep slumber would find the look and feel of it familiar, a couple of nods to the present day nothwithstanding – a mention of Instagram and a cameo from the London mayor, Sadiq Khan.
When I voiced some of my misgivings during a debate on TV diversity in the House of Commons this spring, I received a torrent of social media abuse, mostly accusations of being humourless and thick. I was not saying that if you like it you are racist; just that it’s a lazy comedy that reinforces majority (mis)understanding of Pakistanis/Asians/Muslims – three categories all too often conflated in the public imagination.
The show does all three a disservice, with cardboard cutout characters. We have a backward and uncouth dad, a deceitful daughter (veiled up for daddykins but living it up on the sly), and a fresh-off-the-boat, wet-behind-the-ears, thickly accented son-in-law, who has become a policeman in the new series. It’s hardly cutting edge. Other characters, who could be potentially interesting – the long-suffering matriarch or the white convert from the mosque, “Dave” – are even less developed.
Given its longevity, and the fact that it’s spawned a stage show , Citizen Khan evidently has fans. But I still find it stomach-churningly, buttock-clenchingly dire. After a scene in which Khan is taught random Polish phrases by a builder, and then tries one out on a female Polish neighbour – accusing her of being a hairy baboon – my 12-year-old, watching for the first time, initially giggled, then went all serious, saying: “They’re trying to show Asian people are thick, Mummy.”
The media is often accused of tokenism. We should be proud that the first Asian comedy in a generation has been commissioned, but the BBC appears to be maintaining the status quo with unimaginative stereotypical portrayals – not exactly the Black and White Minstrel Show, but veering towards the same ballpark.
Back in the 1990s Goodness Gracious Me was a pioneering British-Asian breakthrough consisting of well-observed sketches of situations young Asians could relate to: the competitive couples keen to assimilate in the suburbs or “going out for an English”. Likewise, Desmond’s was generally seen as an affectionate depiction of a minority community.
I imagine that after this piece I’ll again be labelled too sensitive, told I need to chill out more, and that it’s typical of Muslims to not see the funny side. As a second-generation British-born Bengali, I have enormous respect for the risk-taking first generation; but Khan, with the scrapes he gets into, is crude slapstick that compares poorly with, say, the far more sophisticated film Four Lions, about bungling UK Islamic terrorists.
The BBC can get this right. The recent mockumentary series People Just Do Nothing, about a pirate radio station called Kurupt FM, hit the spot by laughing with main-man Pakistani entrepreneur Chabuddy G, not at him. By contrast, Citizen Khan is dated and cringeworthy – and should be consigned to the 70s scrapheap.
If there were more Asian comedy shows out there one duff one might not matter so much – but given that this is the first in years, and the only such offering on mainstream TV, it means that mainstream audiences will be liable to think all Asians and Muslims are like the Khans.
We live in an age of rocketing post-Brexit hate crime with a US president elected on a pledge to ban Muslims. In this climate, Citizen Khan does us no favours at all.
