FLAKES: BAN BBC SHOW... 52YRS ON
Round the Horne moan
A REPEAT of one of Britain’s bestloved radio comedies sent the Beeb into a panic – after just one snowflake complained.
The episode of Round the Horne from 52 years ago was said to have “broken BBC standards”.
The snowflake moaned that one of the sketches starring Kenneth Williams had racist stereotypes and called for the whole show to be banned.
Now the Beeb has decided that any future broadcasts of the episode will be preceded by a warning.
The complaint was made over an episode parodying the 1950 movie Young Man With A Horn, in which Williams plays a young white man, Bix Spiderthrust, who wanted to enter the black-dominated world of jazz music in the 1920s.
The spoof, entitled Young Horne With A Man, was a send-up of the young white jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke and some of the sketch’s characters were given exaggerated accents.
The host, Kenneth Horne, made no attempt at putting on a voice, with the joke being that his plummy Home Counties tones were entirely inappropriate for the setting.
But after the episode was repeated on
Radio 4 Extra in February, a listener contacted the BBC to say it was offensive. The BBC’s editorial complaints unit agreed, in findings released this week, that the show was in breach of its standards but fell short from banning it completely. The watchdogs ruled that the episode should always be broadcast with a warning in future, saying that “the portrayal of the black characters by white actors was outdated and, in today’s context, potentially offensive”. The unit noted: “It was the stereotypes often encountered in biopics of the era which were the target of the sketch’s humour, and the use of exaggerated accents (for white southern characters as well as black ones) would have been more likely, in the programme’s original context, to undercut prejudice than to perpetuate it.” Round The Horne was voted the Best Radio Comedy of all time last year by The Radio Times. The show – which ran between 1965 to 1968 – featured Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and Williams. But it ended when its eponymous star Horne died of a heart attack in 1969.