Our ancestors were all guilty of something, says Lumley

CANCEL culture threatens to take a “wrecking ball” to society because all of our ancestors were guilty of historical wrongs, Dame Joanna Lumley has said.

The actress, who explores the histories of Berlin, Paris and Rome for her latest ITV series, Great Cities of the World, was asked about confronting the past and said: “All our ancestors were linked with something, so you can’t suddenly go: ‘But I don’t do that’.

“If you eat sugar, you’re probably eating sugar that came from sugar factories that were [once] worked by slaves.

“Lots of things were obviously reprehensible, the slave trade being one; you can’t defend that. But there are different things that were done in the past which we can’t change. We don’t do them now because we wouldn’t.”

In the Radio Times interview, she added: “I don’t know how much of the past you can smash up without finding that the wrecking ball has come very close to your house.”

In the same magazine, Libby Purves, the former BBC Radio 4 presenter, criticised the corporation for censoring its comedy archive. She writes: “Never a day passes without someone mis-speaking: Jimmy Carr, some random MP, your worst uncle. Sometimes the offending words aren’t as nastily crass as Carr’s recent remarks about the Roma [Carr joked during his Netflix special that nobody mentions gipsy victims of the Holocaust because “no one wants to talk about the positives”] but purely dated: the past was another country.

“But we should still respect it because it was real, and the BBC, especially, has an important duty here … why dishonestly take a smoothing-iron to old jokes, gentrify the crumbling old edifices that sheltered generations from the dull hardness of life?”

Purves said jokes considered politically incorrect today should be left in place because “it’s actually refreshing to be made to cringe”.

The BBC has edited episodes of classic shows to remove jokes that could be deemed racist, sexist or homophobic.

Edits to programmes broadcast on the Radio 4 Extra archive channel include a 1971 radio episode of Steptoe and Son, in which Wilfrid Brambell said: “You’re carrying on like some poofy Victorian poet.”

A line in which Corporal Jones referred to Chinese people as “yellow friends” was also excised from a 1974 episode of