Some Seventies Sitcoms Revisited

Seventies sitcoms are a funny thing - and not necessarily funny in the way intended by the makers.  Watching them now, from a distance of fifty-plus years, you are sometimes left wondering exactly why some of them were so popular at the time.  Of course, in part, for me, the answer lies, partially, in the fact that when I first saw them, I was a child and far less critical, not to mention far less aware of the gender, class and racial politics that underpinned the humour.  While most of them seem dated, to put it mildly, I many of their attitudes, as always, we have to put it all in context and accept that, at the time of their making, these merely reflected the wider social values of the time.  Well, usually.  Even as a child back in the seventies I thought 'hilarious' ITV race comedy Love Thy Neighbour was offensive, it's supposed humourous look at race relations in the UK simply an excuse to for having every offensive racial epithet for non-whites spoken on air in the guise of it all being 'a joke'.  'But the black characters give as good as they get', was the excuse used by the makers.  Except that a black man calling a white man 'honky' (the extent of the white epithets used), is in no way equivalent to a white man calling a black man by the N-word (amongst other offensive terms).  Mind Your Language, which came later in the seventies is another ITV sitcom which often gets bracketed with Love Thy Neighbour as being irredeemably racially offensive, but, having recently seen most of the first series again, for the first time since its first screening, I'm left feeling somewhat ambivalent about it.

The thing about Mind Your Language - which is based around a class of English as a Foreign Language students and the tribulations of their teacher as he tries to teach them the language - is that it isn't so much that it bandies about racial epithets, but that it trades in some truly outrageous racial and cultural stereotypes.  Where it does employ terms of fairly mild racial abuse, it puts them in the mouths of non-white characters, most notably the Pakistani and Sikh students, who engage in an ongoing war of words.  At the time, this must have seemed a smart way to get away with generating a few cheap laughs from their use without seeming to be endorsing white vs black race hate.  But it is those stereotypes which seem most jarring today - they really are crude in the extreme, but at least not confined to non-white characters.  Whilst the Pakistani, Sikh and Indian characters do, indeed, speak in the stereotypical 'amusing' fashion popularised by Peter Sellers, complete with mispronunciations and malapropisms, so do the Greek, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, French, Japanese and Chinese characters, just with different accents.  They all conform to the appropriate cultural stereotypes: the Austrian woman is stern and frosty, the French girl a sexy tease, the Italian guy a sex maniac, the Chinese girl a propaganda-spouting devotee of Chairman Mao and so on.  The thing is that the stereotypes are so lazily obvious, that they simply fail to offend.  That, combined with the fact that the characters, regardless of race and culture, are presented as being sympathetic defuses the potential offensiveness of the situation.  Which isn't to say that the series isn't as corny as hell, peddling in hoary old jokes and running through all the farcical stock situations so beloved of seventies sitcoms.  But was very popular back in the late seventies.  So popular was it in overseas markets that, incredibly, five years or so after its initial run had ended, another series was made for export, featuring many of the same characters and stereotypes.  Even foreigners, it seems, can enjoy a good stereotype, even of themselves...