A panel game called ‘Shoot the Poof ’ wouldn’t fly today
Comedy isn’t just a form of entertainment. It’s also a form of social history. Watching a decades-old sitcom or sketch show is a bit like digging up a time capsule. It reveals a lot about the attitudes of the period in which it was made, the language that people used and the subjects that people joked about. It would, of course, be absurd to denounce an old comedy for failing to reflect today’s mores. Still, it’s always interesting to see how times have changed.
This week saw the publication of several unused script ideas for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which were included in a batch of papers donated by Michael Palin to the British Library. One such idea – intended for the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail
– features a character called the Pink Knight, who refuses to let King Arthur cross a bridge until he’s given him a kiss. Palin has conceded that today such a joke might be frowned upon. “Nowadays [it] may not be as funny,” he says, “because we’ve changed a lot in our attitudes since then.”
He can say that again. The various series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus contain any number of jokes that the BBC wouldn’t dare broadcast if they were written today. For example, the sketch featuring John Cleese in blackface as a West Indian cricketer. And the sketch featuring Graham Chapman playing what the script calls a “Chinaman” (“Would you like drinkee?”). And the sketch imagining a Japanese version of an Elizabethan costume drama (“I bling a dispatch flom Prymouth”). And the sketch featuring a woman named
“Mrs Nigger-baiter”.
Not that Monty Python was meant to be racist. In some sketches it satirised racism.
But it did so in a manner that would possibly be deemed a bit too forceful for today’s sensibilities. For example, the sketch imagining a moronic game show called Spot the Braincell, in which a contestant randomly blurts, “I don’t like darkies!” – and the host replies, “Ha ha ha! Who does?” Or the sketch imagining a programme called Prejudice – which, in the words of its host, is: “The show that gives you a chance to have a go at wops, krauts, nigs, eyeties, gyppos, bubbles, froggies, chinks, yids, jocks, polacks, paddies and dagoes!” The sketch ends with the host introducing a panel game called Shoot the Poof.
Even in the name of satire, you’d be unlikely to get a sketch like that on the BBC in 2018. Just as you probably wouldn’t get a sketch in which a butcher calls a customer “a la-di-da pooftah” (Python series two, episode five). Or a sketch in which a man knocks seven bells out of a schoolgirl in a boxing match (also series two, episode five). Or a sketch in which a group of dirty old men in raincoats gather round the hospital bed of a buxom young blonde and leer at her (series two, episode seven). And, in the age of the Twitter police, you surely couldn’t get away with Pythonstyle jokes about cross-dressing and gender identity. For example,
The Lumberjack Song, in which the lumberjack reveals that “I put on women’s clothing and hang around in bars” – prompting all the other characters to walk off-screen in disgust. And, in particular, the scene from 1979’s Life of Brian, in which a character named Stan is ridiculed for announcing that from now on he wishes to be known as Loretta. (“I’m not ‘oppressing’ you, Stan – you haven’t got a womb. Where’s the foetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?”)
In an interview this week, John Cleese was asked why the BBC doesn’t repeat Python any more. Perhaps, he said, the BBC was scared: scared that, next to Python, today’s comedies would look weak and unfunny.
True enough, Python is funnier than anything on TV right now. But it might not be the only reason.
A new book, The Colour of Time by Dan Jones and Marina Amaral, does something simple but extraordinary. It takes black-and-white photos of historic events and colours them in. The effect is transformative.
Black-and-white makes events seem ancient, remote. In the context of historical tragedies and atrocities, that can feel comforting (this happened long ago, in a different world; it couldn’t possibly happen now). Colouring in photos (of the Blitz, for example, or the evacuation from Dunkirk) makes them more disturbing, because the photos look as though they could have been taken yesterday.
The most disturbing colourised photo is of Hitler. He glares out at us, wearing a brown shirt, a stubby little black tie and a pair of absurd brown lederhosen, with bright white socks pulled up to his knees.
He looks like a genocidal boy scout.
I keep hearing that we can endure the results of a “no deal” Brexit – food rationing, medicine shortages etc – if we just show a bit of Blitz spirit. Some good old-fashioned stiff upper lip. Keep calm and carry on.
I thought about that, this week, when I read the news about a woman in Essex ringing 999 to complain that her local takeaway had delivered the wrong pizza. “I rung up for a number 18 meat feast and she’s trying to tell me, ‘Nah, you ordered a number eight’,” the woman told police. “I’m allergic to mushrooms so I know for a fact I didn’t order a number eight…”
The emergency services receive calls like this all the time. Earlier this year, a woman in the East Midlands rang 999 to complain that the eggs in her fridge were cracked. In 2011, a man rang Merseyside police to complain about his hangover. And in 2010, a man in the West Midlands rang for an ambulance because he’d had what he described as “a facial haemorrhage”; in reality, it was blood oozing from a spot he’d squeezed. In recent years, the emergency services have also received demands to help members of the public bring their washing in, and to give them a lift to the airport because they’ve slept through their alarm.
Anyway, about that no deal Brexit… Are we quite sure we’re ready?