Oh, the horrors a dig through our country’s black cultural archives can unearth. How’s this for vintage stomach-churning racism, punchlined by a national treasure in blackface? In 1969 – two years, indeed, after my dad arrived in the UK from India – Spike Milligan created a new sitcom, Curry and Chips. Even the title is a masterclass in stereotyping. Written by Johnny Speight, who also gifted Alf Garnett to the nation, it starred Milligan in blackface as a Pakistani immigrant called Kevin O’Grady. (His name, presumably, a joke about the immigrant’s pathetic stabs at assimilation.) “I leave Pakistan because there are far too many wogs there,” he says in a clip in Lenny Henry’s Race Through Comedy (Gold). I’ll leave you to imagine the accent. “So I come to England and there are still too many wogs.” Cue canned laughter.
It only lasted one series, which, frankly, is one too many. “If Spike Milligan wanted to do a comedy series and Johnny Speight wanted to write it, you didn’t say no, did you?” says Humphrey Barclay (head of comedy at LWT from 1977 to 1983), half a century later. Well no, clearly you didn’t.
In the first of a three-part series exploring the unsung history of multicultural comedy, Henry homes in on “the good, the bad and frankly really ugly sitcoms of the last 50 years”. An affable presenter, Henry is sometimes a bit too generous about material this appallingly unfunny. But Curry and Chips was no anomaly in a Britain gripped by post-colonial shock. Out of such fearful times, vicious light entertainments such as Love Thy Neighbour were also born. “I think that show did more harm than good,” Henry notes. Sample line? “I’m calling to make a complaint against a nig-nog,” white, working-class character Eddie says to a police officer. “What’s he done?” “He’s moved next door!” If we get the sitcoms we deserve, I dread to think what is being dreamed up in the still predominantly white, middle-class annals of our TV networks right now.
The sitcom is a powerful lens through which to view the race-responsive temperature of our times. Situation comedy riffs, after all, on our current situation. We all grew up with one sitcom or another, whether it was reflecting our lives, reinforcing stereotypes, or, once in a blue moon, breaking new ground. My own was The Cosby Show (1984-1992), which I loved fiercely as an 80s brown child, and is discussed here in the most weird, uptight and avoidant language. “Long before his misdemeanours came to light, Bill Cosby was one of the greatest comedians of all time …” begins one talking head. “I know it’s very difficult to think of this in the light of … recent developments … in Cosby’s life,” he concludes, looking like he wants the ground to swallow him up. In a show exploring the impact of comedy on our culture and vice versa, which really means the impact of words, is it really so hard to say: “Cosby is currently serving a sexual assault sentence”?
There was also the good, of course. The Fosters (1976-1977) got black representation right, for once, and featured a teenage Henry in his screen debut. According to the comedian Gina Yashere, “he was the holy grail of wow”. According to Henry, he was “terrible. You can watch me learning how to act, episode by episode.” For the very first sitcom on Channel 4, No Problem! (1983-1985), Barclay commissioned the Black Theatre Co-operative to write and perform their own material. Unsurprisingly, giving black people the chance to write about and represent themselves resulted in genuinely good comedy. “We got a voice right for the first time,” Barclay observes.
Eventually we got Desmond’s (1989-1994), the beloved black sitcom set in a Peckham barber shop, which starred the classically trained actor Norman Beaton in the titular role. What is not discussed here is the conspicuous lack of quality Asian sitcoms over the past 50 years. Only Citizen Khan (2012) gets a cursory mention, and there are plenty who think that sitcom came straight out of the 70s. Neither is there a discussion about why Desmond’s has never been matched in terms of a hit mainstream black sitcom. Instead, Henry focuses on the new era of comedians making shows on their mobile phones, and Michaela Coel writing and starring in the brilliant Chewing Gum. Meanwhile, the story about why more black and Asian comedy still is not commissioned or nurtured, why comedy inspired by our situation continues to be seen as a risk, a box-ticking exercise, or something that only the BAME community would watch, remains untold.
