Blacked Out

No, nobody is proposing to 'ban' Gavin and Stacy becuase it has a character called 'Chinese Alan',  The Inbetweeners hasn't been removed from YouTube because of 'political correctness' and that episode of Fawlty Towers hasn't been removed from UKTV because it is offensive to Germans.  It's all 'fake news' perpetuated by social media and stoked by the tabloids.  In the case of Gavin and Stacy, this story seems to have been promoted by certain tabloids with the apparent intent to stir shit against the background of the 'Black Lives Matter' campaign.  As for The Inbetweeners, those episodes have been taken down from YouTube because of streaming rights issues - Britbox now holds these rights.  The Fawlty Towers case is interesting as it involves a single episode.  The issue here seems to be that the BBC had edited this episode some years ago to remove the Major's use of the N-word, UKTV, however, had still been using the unedited episode.  Despite John Cleese's all too predictable denunciation of the BBC for 'political correctness' today, he actually agreed to this edit. 

But just why are some people getting so worked up about this sort of thing?  The only stuff apparently removed from anywhere so far - Little Britain and Come Fly With Me - have simply vanished from some streaming services.  They haven't been erased from history.  You can still watch your DVDs of them.  Or, if you don't have them on DVD, I'm sure that you can still buy the DVDs from somewhere.  Sure, there is a whiff of panic, akin to the 'video nasties' scare, to this sudden reappraisal of film and TV back catalogues in the light of 'Black Lives Matter'.  Just because something contains 'blackface' or similar doesn't automatically mean either that is racist or without value.  The use of blackface was prevalent in films in the twenties and thirties and still seen in the forties and fifties, ('yellowface' with white actors portraying Asians was still commonplace in the sixties and there are examples even later than that), but some of these older films arguable have historic and cultural value.  Not least because they give us an insight into attitudes of their eras as a reminder of how times have changed.  As for things like The Mighty Boosh and the 'Spirit of Jazz' character, I can't say that it ever occurred to me that this was meant to be a blackface character.  It is never clear that he is meant to be a black caricature played by a white man - he's just another surreal character amongst many in the show.  Unlike, say, Little Britain, where the characters causing offence clearly are meant to be black caricatures, played by white performers blacked up.  which doesn't necessarily mean that it should be banned, but it should certainly causer viewers concern.