The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
THE STORY BEHIND...
It aired in 2010 but felt like it was from the Seventies – Tom Fordy on the ill-starred ‘Little Britain’ follow-up
because, according to him, the only difference between a straight man and a bisexual one is two pints of lager. (Cut to them in a pub – “Another pint of lager?” asks Fearghal.)
But at its worst, Come Fly with Me is deeply uncomfortable. It’s hard to imagine how Precious ever seemed a good idea; dwarfs are used for visual gags; and the show plummets to its nadir when Moses – Walliams painted up – speaks mock Chinese to a “Chinaman”. Pardon the pun, to quote Moses, but it just wouldn’t fly in 2020.
Lucas and Williams belonged to a generation of comedians who pushed the parameters of political correctness ironically. They made themselves the joke to send up prejudice. The idea was that they were so clearly liberal that it was all done in the name of satire. As Father Ted, Dermot Morgan put a lampshade on his head and pulled his eyes into slits. Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge boasted he was “homo-sceptic”. And Sacha Baron Cohen, in the guise of Ali G, asked: “Is it because I is black?”
Lucas and Walliams emerged on that comedy scene as progressives. According to Lucas, Daffyd and Emily in Little Britain were intended as a celebration of queerness. Come Fly with Me sent up racism through Walliams’s immigration officer, Ian Foot, who is deeply suspicious of anyone foreign or non-white.
But Lucas and Walliams clearly felt that, after a PC backlash, it was all right for white comedians to black up again. “In the late Eighties and Nineties […] people said, ‘It’s wrong to make comedy out of the fact you’re a white person playing a black person, that is not acceptable for comedy’,” recalled Lucas. “When we were doing Little
Britain and Come Fly with Me, it felt like things had gone somewhere else again after that.”
Lucas has said that both shows were meant to celebrate Britain’s multiculturalism – plus, on a shallower level, to show off the range of characters they could play. “Fat, thin, tall, short, straight, gay, male, female, young, old,” Lucas wrote in his autobiography, Little Me (2017). “David and I saw playing different races as part of that.”
In a making-of documentary filmed before Come Fly with Me aired, Walliams said: “It’s a hard one because there is a pleasure in seeing us dressed up. And there is something pleasurable about sometimes outrageous looks […] where you go, ‘Oh my word, I can’t believe the make-up.’ But I think the character needs to be funny beyond its racial characteristics… all the characters we’ve created of different ethnicities, I think they’ve been comic characters not specifically to do with their race.” He added: “We wouldn’t do a whole series about two Japanese girls. It would be a bit odd. But I think for a couple of minutes it’s acceptable.”
Arguably, Lucas and Walliams (who was accused of racism again in 2017 for dressing as Kim Jong-un for Hallowe’en) have borne the brunt of retrospective wokeness. You rarely hear Vic and Bob being called out for playing Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye; or Harry Enfield for playing Nelson Mandela; or Chris Morris, one of the Left’s favourite comic minds, for performing “Uzi Lover” while blacked up in The Day Today.
Lucas was quick to admit that playing Thai bride Ting Tong was a mistake. “I thought we got the tone of those sketches wrong,” calling the execution “too rudimentary and insensitive… My performance was crude and simplistic and hard to defend. I have a feeling that if we hadn’t spent all the time and money on those prosthetics, we might have reviewed those sketches and cut them out of the show.”
In 2018, Walliams told Radio Times that Little Britain, if it returned, would be “different”. “There’s all kinds of tolerances that change. People understand people’s predicaments more now… I wouldn’t rule out anything because I basically think you have to be able to make jokes about everything, everyone. Otherwise there is no point having comedy.”
Speaking to The Big Issue in 2017, Lucas was more frank about what he would and wouldn’t do. “I wouldn’t play black characters,” he said. “Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now. Society has moved on a lot since then, and my own views have evolved. There was no bad intent there – 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. My aim is to entertain, I don’t have any other agenda. And as I’ve got older, I’ve become more empathetic. I care more about hurting people.”
‘If we hadn’t spent all the money on those prosthetics, we might have cut the sketches’