British sitcoms have a history of resorting to crude stereotypes when it comes to portraying foreign characters – 70s sitcoms such as It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum and Mind Your Language are considered too racist to rebroadcast, even in these times of numerous re-run channels. Some would argue that these stereotypes have now simply relocated from sitcoms to Top Gear, so it’s perhaps surprising to find this week’s schedules book-ended by comedies that feature foreign characters.
On Monday night BBC4 broadcast the first part of Asylum, a three-part farce inspired by Julian Assange’s predicament, with Ben Miller as Dan Hern, a GCHQ analyst who, after leaking CIA secrets, takes refuge in the London embassy of a Latin American nation. His protectors include Castillo, a suave diplomat, and Rosa, an attractive young woman. And Friday sees the last part of the seventh series of Benidorm (ITV, 9pm), the Spanish holiday comedy which (along with its generic ancestor Duty Free) is among the small number of British sit-coms set abroad.
Asylum uses two tricks to claim diplomatic immunity against suggestions of international insensitivity. The Latin American territory that grants sanctuary to Miller’s character is fictional, which means that any offence would have to be taken by – or protests would have to come from – a very large geographical region. And, in a common contemporary solution to accusations of racism, the Latin Americans – acted by Kayvan Novak and Yasmine Akram - are smarter and classier than the English characters: the targets of most of the gags are the egotism and cowardice of Hern and Ludo Backslash, an inane hacker also seeking asylum (played by Dustin Demri-Burns).
It’s typical of the international dynamics that, while Hern is desperate to seduce Rosa, she rejects his approaches with contempt in a reverse of the power relationship between, say, Basil Fawlty and his non-anglophone waiter, Manuel, played by Andrew Sachs.
It seems unimaginable now that a Spanish character as hapless as Manuel would be permitted in a new BBC comedy – and certainly not if played by a British actor. In ITV peak-time, however, the descendants of Manuel still exist and – possibly rather depressingly for the Spanish ambassador to the UK – are still occupying much the same line of work. Benidorm has a Spanish bartender, Mateo (Jake Canuso), just as Duty Free had a Spanish waiter called Carlos and the students in Mind Your Language included Juan, a bartender from Spain.
It’s unfair, though, to suggest that there has not been some progress in the depiction of the delivery of drinks by Spaniards on British television. Mateo in Benidorm speaks much better English than Andrew Sachs was ever allowed to and, in an exchange at the start of Friday’s episode, gets the better of his English boss in a conversation that turns on the correct useage of the word “what” – which feels like a knowing use of the translation of Manuel’s famous catch-phrase.
In both Benidorm and Asylum, the more careful writing of dialogue is complemented by the casting of actors who have at least some non-English heritage (although not necessarily Spanish or Latin American) and this should help the series avoid joining those 1970s xenophobia shows on the never-repeat shelf. Asylum in particular, by showing foreigners becoming exasperated with the idiotic English, marks a significant entry in the embassy book of condolence for the sort of shows we used to make.
