LONDON — On Thursday night, the British chat-show host Trisha Goddard discussed the impact of an impersonation of her by a white comedian in blackface that was popular on television here in the early 2000s.
“I’ve only recently discovered how bullied my children were” as a result of the character, Goddard said on the BBC program “Newsnight.”
“Let me be clear on this. If the parody was just of me, that would be one thing,” she said. But “it was racial, over-the-top: the big lips, the big wide hips, the rice and peas.” It was “all the things that every black child has been bullied about,” she added.
The character was one of several caricatures of black celebrities on the show “Bo’ Selecta!” that were played by the white comedian Leigh Francis, wearing masks with grotesquely exaggerated features. At the time, the musician Craig David described in interviews how humiliating he found the show’s character based on him.
Last Friday, Francis apologized via a video on Instagram for these impersonations, saying, “I didn’t realize how offensive it was.” A few days later, the broadcaster Channel 4 removed the show from its streaming service.
“Bo’ Selecta!” is one of a host of once-popular British comedy shows that have been pulled from streaming services here this week, including Netflix and the BBC’s iPlayer, because they include blackface or racial slurs, some from as recently as 2010.
For many Britons, blackface is understood to be an ugly relic of the country’s past, used to ridicule and demean people of color and perpetuate racist stereotypes. Blackface on British TV is largely associated with “The Black and White Minstrel Show,” a now notorious but once extremely popular variety show that featured people singing in blackface. The BBC stopped airing it in 1978, but the shows pulled this week, including “The League of Gentlemen,” “Little Britain” and “The Mighty Boosh,” highlight how many more recent depictions have been accepted on British television.
Now, with the mainstream representations of black lives at the forefront of many people’s minds, after tens of thousands attended Black Lives Matter protests across the country and protesters removed a slave trader’s statue in Bristol, British television is having to grapple with these recent racist depictions.
Gina Yashere, a British comedian and the executive producer of the CBS series “Bob Hearts Abishola,” said in a telephone interview that it shouldn’t have taken George Floyd’s killing and the global response to make people rethink blackface.
Black comedians had been pointing out that using blackface in comedy was wrong “for years,” she added. “We were told we had no sense of humor. We were told we were being negative,” she said. “We were told that it was sour grapes, that we were jealous.”
“They say, ‘Oh it’s just us playing characters,’” Yashere added. “It isn’t characters. It’s always in comedy and it’s always sending up black people.”
Some of the shows pulled from streaming services were made by household names here. On Tuesday, the BBC removed “Little Britain,” a sketch show created by David Walliams and Matt Lucas that aired from 2003-05, from its streaming service because it featured Walliams playing an obese black woman in a sauna. “Times have changed since ‘Little Britain’ first aired,” a BBC spokesman said in an emailed statement. The pair both also played minority characters in their follow-up BBC show from 2010, “Come Fly With Me,” which was not available for streaming.
Earlier this year, Lucas was appointed a host of “The Great British Baking Show.”
On Wednesday, Netflix removed the surreal comedy shows “The League of Gentlemen” and “The Mighty Boosh” from its platforms. Noel Fielding, who is also a host of “The Great British Baking Show,” appeared as a character called The Spirit of Jazz in one “Mighty Boosh” sketch, wearing dreadlocks and blackface. (“The League of Gentlemen” and “The Mighty Boosh” are still available to stream on the BBC’s platform.)
Ava Vidal, a British comedian, said in a telephone interview that she had never been surprised about the use of blackface in these shows. “I think it’s so ingrained,” she said, “people don’t even realize what’s going on.”
“You’ve got to let black people and people of color decide what racism is,” she added.
In Britain, blackface has promoted “harmful stereotypes that are often not even based in truth,” she said. She pointed to the impersonation of Goddard, saying it also included a Jamaican accent.
“It was simply generic nonsense,” Vidal said, adding that people often talk to her with “fake” West Indian accents. “Those types of stereotypes make life hell for people, and kids suffer terribly at school because of it.”
Yashere said she had spent her school years being mocked with references to the “Black and White Minstrel Show.” “These are the things you put up with because of blackface, because we were dehumanized and made to look stupid,” she added.
It’s not just on comedy series. On Wednesday, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly — two high-profile presenters of British reality TV — posted an apology on social media for “impersonating” people of color in order to prank other celebrities on their show “Saturday Night Takeaway.”
On Friday, it emerged that UKTV, another streaming service, had taken down an episode of the John Cleese comedy “Fawlty Towers” that contains racial slurs. (The segment had long been edited out of the episode when it was broadcast on television, but is still viewable on Netflix.) On social media, some people of color expressed concern that the pushback around removing an episode of a “classic” comedy such as “Fawlty Towers” risks distracting from the wider debate about race in Britain.
“It makes me sick to think of all the petty culture war nonsense that’s going to absolutely flood the zone soon and risk turning an epic moment into just more ammunition for bad faith actors to say black people and lefties are trying to cancel everything,” Nesrine Malick, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote on Twitter.
Representatives for Fielding, Lucas, and other stars whose shows were removed from streaming services all declined or did not respond to interview requests. But in the past, several have defended or sought to explain their use of blackface.
“There was no bad intent there,” Lucas said in a 2017 magazine interview. “The only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play. Now I think it’s lazy for white people to get a laugh just by playing black characters.”
Reece Shearsmith, one of the writers and stars of “The League of Gentlemen,” has repeatedly said that one of his characters on the show, Papa Lazarou — a carnival owner whose face is painted black with white circling his eyes and mouth — was not intended to be black. In February, The Independent newspaper asked Shearsmith if he understood the complaints. “I guess so,” he said.
“It was always this clown-like makeup, and we just came up with what we thought was the scariest idea to have in a sort of Child Catcher-like way,” he added.
After hearing Shearsmith’s claims, Yashere said they were scarcely believable given that the makeup looked the same as old racist imagery. “That was not a clown. That was a golliwog,” she said, naming a minstrel caricature once shown on jar labels in Britain. “He didn’t come up with anything,” she added. “All he did was take all the horrible depictions of black people on products as far back as the 1800s and reconstituted it, and said it’s ironic.”
British comedy has a long and uneven tradition of continuing to push boundaries of taste, even when people of color raise concerns. The last week even saw one former star defend blackface on BBC radio.
On Thursday, Harry Enfield, a comedian who was popular on British TV in the 1990s, said he had appeared as black characters “several times in the past,” including once playing Nelson Mandela as a drug dealer. That was “so wrong, it was right,” he said of the sketch. “I wouldn’t do it now,” he added, “but I don’t think I regret it.” He then mentioned the stage name of one music hall star despite it containing a racial slur.
Several British comedians mocked Enfield’s comments online. “Essentially a lot of the defense of blackface in comedy comes down to people being more outraged that they’re not allowed to play dress up than racism itself,” tweeted Lolly Adefope, who stars in Hulu’s “Shrill.”
On the radio show, Enfield tried to make a final defense for blackface by asking what would happen if Rishi Sunak — Britain’s chancellor — ever became prime minister. “I’ve played Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron,” he said. “I would find it difficult that I would not be allowed to play him because of the color of his skin.”
Vidal was a guest on the show and was asked for her response. She said she was sure Enfield could find ways to mock the prime minister “without blacking up.”
Comedy, she had said earlier in the segment, is “about being funny, first and foremost. Punching down and picking on oppressed people is not funny.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
