IRAM RAMZAN: Why the bigots were the butt of the jokes in 1970s British comedies

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For people of my generation and younger, the name Jack Smethurst means nothing. But for those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Smethurst was famous for playing racist factory worker Eddie Booth in the ITV sitcom Love Thy Neighbour.

Written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, the ITV show was set in suburban Twickenham, and featured Bill and Barbie Reynolds (portrayed by Rudolph Walker and Nina Baden-Semper), a black couple who moved in next door to Eddie and Joan Booth (Smethurst and Kate Williams), who were white.

The show ran for eight series and drew in 16 million viewers at its peak. In the years since, however, it has been widely condemned for promoting racial stereotypes and its overtly racist script.

Smethurst’s death last week, aged 89, has re-ignited the debate about this sitcom and other 1970s TV shows.

On Twitter, The Times columnist Oliver Kamm said that while he was sorry to hear the news about the actor’s death, ‘sitcoms like Love Thy Neighbour and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum [the hit BBC show about a Royal Artillery concert party stationed in India and Burma] were reviled for their racism at the time, just as they are now.

‘They are a shameful episode in Britain’s cultural history and should not be prettified with euphemism,’ he wrote.

Certainly, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, starring Windsor Davies and Don Estelle, stands accused of promoting homophobia, due to its liberal use of the word ‘poofs’. It is also controversial today because the white actor Michael Bates wore ‘brownface’ to play the Indian character Rangi Ram.

In Bates’s defence, however, there were few established South Asian actors in the UK back then. A former officer in the Gurkhas, he had been born in India and spoke fluent Hindi and Urdu, so perhaps there was some justification in the casting.

There is more to criticise in Love Thy Neighbour. The script featured appallingly racist language and slurs. Eddie Booth calls his neighbour Bill Walker ‘chocolate drop’ and much worse. Bill doesn’t take the abuse lying down, and responds by calling Eddie ‘white honky’ and ‘snowflake’ (not to be confused with the modern-day usage).

Such language is utterly unacceptable today, and rightly so. You won’t hear it on television, nor are you likely to hear it in common usage on the street.

But where I take issue with Kamm is his claim that Love Thy Neighbour and other shows deemed unsuitable for modern audiences were ‘reviled’ at the time.

Far from it. They were prime-time entertainment and hugely popular, attracting large audiences. (It Ain’t Half Hot Mum boasted 17 million viewers.) Jack Smethurst, who in real life had grandchildren of mixed race, later said that the programme ‘broke down a few barriers rather than built any. The only complaints I get are from white people’.

His co-star, Walker, who came to Britain from Trinidad in 1960 and has enjoyed a long and very successful acting career (he plays Patrick Trueman in EastEnders), has always insisted he is proud of his role on Love Thy Neighbour.

‘It was for pure entertainment,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t meant to solve the problem of racism at all . . . Things have changed. What I find sad today is that we’ve become so politically correct.’ Kamm and fellow critics are no doubt well intentioned in calling out bigotry, but they are missing an important point here. It does not seem to occur to them that many black and Asian people were also fans of such programmes. And that includes members of my family and their friends.

Take my landlady; born in Bradford in the 60s to Indian parents, she has described to me the appalling racist abuse that women of colour received back then. Yet she also tells me how much she enjoyed Love Thy Neighbour. In her view, it was entertaining, but she also believes it served another purpose: it revealed to the audience exactly what white bigots really thought about people like her.

‘I think you’ve got to have a laugh at yourself sometimes,’ she said. ‘We watched it because that’s all there was. But I really hate it when people today tell me what I should or shouldn’t be offended by. I know what racism is.’

My mum was a fan of Rising Damp, another popular 1970s sitcom in which Leonard Rossiter played mean and bigoted landlord Rigsby, who presided over some seedy bedsits. He was routinely racist towards his black medical student tenant, but invariably ended up the butt of jokes himself.

Mum also liked Mind Your Language, a comedy about foreign students learning English, which played relentlessly for laughs on racial and national stereotypes.

And occasionally, she would watch and enjoy Till Death Do Us Part, the long-running BBC comedy which featured Alf Garnett, as the ultimate blue-collar bigot, portrayed brilliantly by Warren Mitchell.

Alf often used extremely racist language, spitting out ‘c**n and w**, as well as verbally abusing his clever but layabout Scouse son-in-law (played by Anthony Booth).

Whenever he was interviewed about the role, Mitchell made it clear that the racism was a mirror to those who watched the show. The racists were the ones being parodied.

I agree. I have no doubt that Alf’s vile language would have given fodder to racists, but I’m sure the vast majority of viewers would have been laughing at Garnett rather than with him.

Indeed, the Mail’s TV critic Christopher Stevens said the show was a satire on bigotry.

‘Alf represented everything bad about Little Englanders,’ he says. ‘But this point was wasted on the Little Englanders themselves, who thought that Alf was a champion of free speech.

‘I remember one teacher telling my [state school] class: “Listen to Alf Garnett, boys — he’s the only man telling the truth on television.” ’

I was surprised, though, that my own mother would ever have enjoyed a show that reflected such offensive views and language, even in parody.

‘It’s all about the intention, at the end of the day,’ she said when I challenged her. ‘It’s different when [the abuse is] actually directed at you. It didn’t really bother us hearing it on TV because that’s just how it was in the 1970s. Obviously, times have changed.’

Indeed they have, and television is better at representing the diversity of modern Britain — and rejecting what is likely to give offence, whether satirical or not, in more enlightened times. But should we be erasing the past?

When Britbox launched in 2019, to showcase the best of British TV past and present, Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part were left off its streaming service because they were deemed unsuitable for modern audiences.

Just last month, the BBC removed sketches from episodes of Chewin’ The Fat, a Scottish comedy show, to avoid offending modern audiences. Last year, UKTV, which is BBC owned, temporarily took down an episode of Fawlty Towers — one of the most acclaimed British comedies, over ‘racial slurs’ and ‘outdated language’.

But while it is right to combat racism, bigotry and prejudice wherever it raises its head, I don’t believe that hiding away such programmes helps the debate.

Characters such as Alf Garnett and Eddie Booth illustrate just how ridiculous, ignorant and narrow-minded bigots are.

They have an educational value, too, for those of us who are too young to remember them. These shows were of their time. They give us a glimpse of attitudes then and help us appreciate how far we’ve come.

By the way, in researching this piece, I discovered that Mind Your Language is still watched in many parts of Africa and East Asia, yet all the characters in it are stereotypes — the hot-headed Sikh, the overtly sexual French lady, the Chinese woman who quotes Chairman Mao at length, etc.

But stereotypes can make for good humour — as long as they are not malicious. And these skits provided a subtle social commentary, allowing people to laugh not just at others, but themselves, too.

They stand in stark contrast to much of today’s programming, which comes with a strong social message that is usually delivered as subtly as a sledgehammer.

To me, it is troubling that we divorce popular culture from its historical context as dictated by a few self-appointed moral guardians.

But whitewashing the past, or to insist — as Oliver Kamm did — that those 1970s sitcoms were not regarded as entertainment by many, amounts to a rewriting and sanitising of British cultural history.