Becky Fury in defence of dubious 1970s sitcoms

Nigel Farage has tried to divert attention from accusations he engaged in racist behaviour at school by suggesting it was merely playground banter, a product of its age like poorly-aged BBC sitcoms.

He raged at the broadcaster for 'double standards', saying that, it should issue an apology for broadcasting programmes such as It Ain't Half Hot Mum, telling the Corporation: 'I'm done with you. Until you apologise, I'm not speaking to you.'

However, there’s a massive difference between the sometimes dodgy casting decisions and ill-judged, but ultimately warm, humour of 1970s and 1980s sitcoms and the vicious racist bullying the Reform leader has been accused of,

And whether Til Death Do Us Part’s Alf Garnett was actually racist or not isn’t really that important in the grander scheme of things because thankfully Alf Garnett isn’t in the running to actually become Prime Minister. It might have escaped young Nigel’s attention but Alf Garnett –  like many similar characters of this period – was intended as a parody rather than a role model. 

1970s sitcoms didn’t explicitly criticise racism but, unlike Farage, many were attempting to be progressive in their own  way. Even the universally maligned  Love Thy Neighbour, with its inclusion of racist slurs is arguably a sophisticated satire on coalface integration in the 1970s, even if it seems misjudged by modern standards. It revolved around a white working-class couple challenged by the fact a West Indian couple had moved in next door – and 53 episodes of 1970s style hilarity ensued. 

Even the title Love Thy Neighbour is actually quite progressive –  although that most likely didn’t register in the head of young Nigel when he was encouraging a group of bully’s to sing ‘gas then all’ at a group of Jewish students, as schoolmates at Dulwich College have alleged. Farage has said he ‘never directly racially abused anybody’ while there.

Talking of Nazis, ’Allo ’Allo was recently accused of racism. That 1980s primetime staple with its endlessly horny French bar owner René, reminiscent of Basil Fawlty if he attended swingers clubs with Sybil and Manuel (which is an episode of Fawlty Towers that really should have been made:  The One Where Basil Accidentally Takes the Acid) 

Both Rene and Basil and all the characters in those sitcoms are cultural stereotypes.  Basil is the stereotypically uptight Englishman, René a stereotypically lustful  French man  

The characters in ’Allo ’Allo are a litany of stupid stereotypes, with stupid names. The German is called Herr Flick, a mother-in-law is called Fanny La Fan and they all have stupid accents… Hence the accusations of racism, with a  trigger warning slapped on. 

The thing is, everyone in ’Allo ’Allo has stupid accents, including the English characters 

What are writers Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft meant to do about the the fact some viewers may laugh harder at the foreign accents 

Much like the characters in Lloyd and Croft’s other hit sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, much of the comedy comes from the fact the characters have funny voices.

Ranji Ram, the Indian sepoy who was proud to be of service to the British army, pictured, says in a ridiculous generic Indian accent: ‘Sahb told me about a beautiful native English girl, she brought her saris at M and Sies.’  Audience laughter 

Again the humour comes from the mispronunciations and accent but if you look at the content of the lines it’s actually pretty egalitarian,

It’s actually saying that Indians  try to understand English culture in the same way as English people try to understand Indian characters  

It’s not Jeremy Lloyd or David Croft’s fault if Nigel Farage found the Indian accents funnier than their equally silly voiced English compadres. Does that make Nigel racist?

It’s a sad truth, still true today, that untraveled and arguably uncultured English speakers will find non English speakers who haven’t yet perfected fluency in their second language funny. And a sitcom’s prime function – aside from making people laugh – is generating ratings, not reeducating racists 

If you want radical comedy that reducates  racists we’ll need to fast-forward a few years to that disruptive and definitive moment in recent cultural history when punk ripped through the edifice of bourgeois culture, like Vyvyan bursting through a brick wall  in the Young Ones; alternative comedy 

1970s sitcoms are rightly accused of centring white men as cultural gatekeepers and presenting two dimensional representations of women and minority groups and getting laughs from funny foreign accents  

But, to an arguably lesser extent, doesn’t that still go on today ? 

Maybe in another 40 years, when we’ve all been replaced with robots or whatever amazing antisocial innovation tech bros have funded into existence, the last few human survivors will huddle together in the post-apocalyptic wasteland watching an episode of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum on a scavenged VHS tape and, as the end credits roll and crackle in that nostalgic way old VHS tapes do they’ll look at each other and say: ‘Wow what diversity! 1970s sitcoms really were a golden age for inclusive human representation…’

Published: 9 Dec 2025