From Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s Little
Britain to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, the idea that it’s OK to be racist to mock
racism is naive and dangerous
In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the sudden prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement across the world, there was one area where unexpected conversations about race began to erupt: the film and TV industry. Episodes of shows including Fawlty Towers and Little Britain were pulled from streaming services at the behest of no one, not least the actual Black Lives Matter movement, for whom this was neither a demand nor a priority.
This wave of removals hit its peak at the end of last month, when an episode of The Golden Girls in which its leads wore mud masks was pulled from Hulu in the US. The author and cultural commentator Roxane Gay described the decision as “weird, counterproductive and stupid. It diminishes the effort to actually end racism. It’s just so dumb.” The author Sathnam Sanghera echoed this sentiment, describing the “panic-erasing” of
British television programmes such as The Mighty Boosh as “idiotic”, arguing that it would “make the deep concern behind BLM seem like political correctness”.