“Every joke,” George Orwell wrote, “is a tiny revolution.” That’s mostly one thing authoritarians can’t stand is being laughed at. Once everyone starts mocking the emperor for having no clothes, the jig is up.
The left are authoritarians par excellence. Consequently, they have all the comic sensibility of two hours of root canal work – and they’re 10 times as sensitive as an exposed nerve-ending.
Case in point: Fran Winston of the Daily Express clutching her pearls at the ’70s comic misadventures of the stupid white honky and the chocolate drop.
I have never seen anything truly irredeemable that could not be shown again in any context until I watched ITV’s 1970s sitcom Love Thy Neighbour. If you are not familiar with the premise, it follows a white working-class couple, Eddie (played by Jack Smethurst) and Joan Booth (Kate Williams), living in Twickenham, whose next-door neighbours are a black couple, Bill (Rudolph Walker) and Barbie Reynolds (Nina Baden-Semper).
God forbid she ever gets strapped into a chair like Alex Delarge and forced to watch Blazing Saddles. She’d be a blubbering mess even before Taggart (Slim Pickens) calls his henchmen “a bunch of Kansas City faggots”.
“It honestly takes a lot to shock me,” she says. Right before going on and on about how shocked, shocked, she is that a comedy lampooning racism has… well, racism. “It takes a lot to leave me speechless, but this succeeded,” she says. Unfortunately, it clearly didn’t actually leave her speechless at all: her real problem seems to be actually shutting up about how offended she is.
Not to mention her astonishing ability to miss the joke.
While the two women strike up a friendship, Eddie is unable to move past his racist beliefs. Meanwhile, Bill gives as good as he gets, and his anti-white sentiments are on a par with his neighbours’ anti-black views […]
The character of Eddie was not one to hold back when it came to his feelings about black people, and his attitude reduced them to stereotypes. That’s not to say Bill is any better – he throws out plenty of insulting phrases of his own aimed at his intolerant white neighbour.
Well… yes. That’s kind of the point. Racism isn’t a white-only foolishness. And genuine racists are genuinely foolish.
And shining through at the heart of the show is a very simple message: Love Thy Neighbour.
As Winston notices, “only sensible characters are Joan and Barbie, who don’t allow their husbands’ prejudices to get in the way of their friendship”. But then she misses that Eddie and Bill are both members of the Jubilee Social Club, where the black Eddie is just another of the working men, welcomed by Nobby, Arthur, Jacko and the gang. More importantly, for all their sniping at each other, Bill and Eddie actually do care for each other. The couple go on holiday together (odd behaviour for racists, don’t you think?) and, when Eddie is tricked into thinking Bill is deadly ill, he willingly gets gulled into performing a humiliating ‘voodoo’ ritual to save his life (for the curious: dancing naked around a tree, chanting, “Pinky, Ponky, Me White Honky”).
In his 2024 autobiography, Rudolph Walker, who currently stars in BBC’s EastEnders as Patrick Truman, defended the show, saying it was about “a black guy and a white guy being damned stupid”. He stated he has “no regrets” about the role and claimed it was a “big stepping stone” which allowed him to become the first black actor to have a major part in a prime-time British sitcom.
Yes, but who cares what a black man has to say about his own life and work? Not when there’s a millennial white saviour woman ready to step in and tell him what’s up.
That’s as may be, but at what price? Eddie definitely feels like the genesis of many of the extreme far-right supporters on social media nowadays. I don’t know how long it is since Rudolph rewatched the show, but it really does not hold up well – and is borderline dangerous in its attitudes.
Sweetie. Darling. She/Her. Let me tell you what this show actually did, at the time it aired. It meant that everyone got to have a good laugh at racism – black and white, which was a huge social safety valve. Perhaps it’s a male thing that women can’t understand, or perhaps it’s a generational thing the trigger-warning-and-safe-space generation just don’t get, but taking the piss out of each other brings people together. If you can have a laugh with someone, you can live with them.
As for supposedly turning people into slobbering racists: for years I deeply loathed the very sight Jack Smethurst, because of Eddie Booth. So the show worked.
However, not only could this not get made today, if you wrote most of the dialogue featured in the scripts, you would be arrested for a hate crime.
That says far more about today, and little of it good, than it does about the ’70s.
