Cilla Black On The Sixties.

[anotheoldgit]

Saw a recent TV snippet of a Cilla Black programme, all about the sixties.

I was surprised it showed a lengthy section regarding the Black & White Minstrel Show, and no one seems to have gone on Twitter or phoned up the TV station, stating that they were deeply offended, what a refreshing change that makes.

Yes that particular show was essential Saturday Night viewing for most in those days, and no one gave it a moments thought.

[hc4361]

I know, piggy, much to the creator's disappointment.

[jourdain2]

I'm still struggling to see anything wrong with the 'Black & White Minstrels'. They were good singers and provided good entertainment - I thought it was a positive in race relations. It just was there, not denigrating, praising musical abilities if anything. That's how I (and presumably everybody else) felt at the time. How things have changed for the worse.

[jourdain2]

P.S. I still refer to a colour as n i g g er brown, did try to change it to donkey brown, (which we were told to do) but that's the one I learnt as a kid and it has stuck. 'Donkey' is a different shade.

[Svejk]

My old mum used to love them. (I hated them)
Where were the race hustlers when I needed them. ;-(

[jourdain2]

I'm sorry, I will have offended people. I don't want to, just telling it as it is. I really don't care about anyone's skin colour. I have been called 'Pinko' and 'Whitey' and I don't object as long as the meaning is friendly.

[lankeela]

On Bargain Hunt today they bought and auctioned a StyIophone and there was not a singIe mention of RoiF Harris!

[Svejk]

Seems daft to me. Trying to write people out of history.

[tonymclark]

"I remember it as being on Sunday evenings....shall have to Google now"

Bathsheba, The Black and White Minstrel Show was shown on Sundays occasionally (the earliest seems to be in 1962)...

You can scroll through these Radio Times listings to find the likely editions you were watching...

http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?order=asc&q=the+black+and+white+minstrel+show#search

[vulcan42]

Is there any reason why Guy Gibsons dog was not renamed Digger or does that annoy somebody else? In this crazy age of PC I'm surprised it wasn't renamed spot- or would that annoy dalmatian owners?

[Svejk]

And acne sufferers.

[Buenchico]

^^^If "'Allo 'Allo" took the mickey out of anyone, it was the British. (e.g. the ridiculous RAF officers and the spy, posing as a French policeman, who couldn't speak decent French).

Johnny Speight and Warren Mitchell both went out of their way to explain that "Till Death Us Do Part" was an attack upon racist (and xenophobic) views. [In a similar vein, much of the humour in "Rising Damp" was based upon mocking Rigsby's racist (or, at best, uninformed) views about people from Africa].

It has been widely suggested that the only reason that "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" isn't repeated on TV is because Michael Bate 'blacked up' for his part. Jimmy Perry (who regarded the series as the finest writing by the Croft & Perry partnership) has since explained that, at the time, there were simply no Asian actors available to play the part.

However "The Black and White Minstrel Show" did, at the very least, risk perpetuating images of black people that were far from positive. Perhaps BBC executives started to see it as an anachronism when it became the the corporation's first programme to be shown in colour?

Even so, I have to say that (at the time) I never even saw it as representing black people. I simply saw it as performers dressing up in traditional costumes (in the same way that pierrot artists might do). Similarly, when I had a golliw0g as a child, I never thought of it as a person (of any race or colour). I simply saw it in the same way that a child today might see a Smurf soft toy.

[mastercraft]

Love Thy Neighbour, a sitcom from the seventies. The words 'sambo' and 'nignog' where common - black, white or somewhere in-between - we all laughed.

[Marshwarble]

You maybe should have been laughing at the jokes though?

[mastercraft]

Jokes? Oh yeah, the ones about white Honkies... we laughed at those too.

[andy-hughes]

mastercraft - //Jokes? Oh yeah, the ones about white Honkies... we laughed at those too. //

As I pointed out - aside from the sledgehammer irony of the racism, there is a number of times one character can call another by the same racial epithet before it becomes unfunny - around two in my case - and after that it becomes Groundhog Day.

The series was lousy comedy, not because of the inverse racism which was quite a ground breaking concept for its time, but because of lazy repetitive writing and utter lack of empathy.

[sandyRoe]

There was a similar one featuring foreign adults learning English. We were invited to laugh at their odd ways. It never struck me as funny

[sandyRoe]

'Mind you language', I think it was called.

[andy-hughes]

sandyRoe - it was Mind Your language and again, once you climbed over the ludicrous cultural stereotyping, you were left with a dreadfully unfunny set of scripts which went nowhere and spent far too long doing it!