Lucas, Walliams, black face and “Little Britain”. What a publicly funded comedy show tells us about the BBC - by Elena Egawhary

On Saturday Matt Lucas and David Walliams released identical statements apologising for having “played characters of other races" in their wildly successful comedy sketch series Little Britain. Celebrity friends, like actor and writer Rebel Wilson, have since come out in force to defend them, describing her friend Matt Lucas as “the kindest, most decent human being ever”. I have never met either Lucas or Walliams but by all accounts they are genuinely “nice” people - the antithesis of what people think of when they talk about stereotypical racists. So how could these very nice people have got it so very wrong?

Over the weekend I sat down to watch the BBC’s Little Britain and Come Fly With Me – it was a very long 72 hours. Little Britain offers at least one joke about race per episode. In the first episode of the first series you have the discriminated against Minstrels.  

Then you have recurring racist characters like Marjorie Dawes, the leader of a weight loss support group who routinely victimises brown people in her class. In the UK, her victim is Meera who she occasionally calls Mary or Moira. In Little Britain USA, the American version of the show, her victim is a Mexican woman who Marjorie refers to as “my illegal friend”. Perhaps the writers’ intended subtext was “look how silly the racist person is” but in most of the sketches those targeted by the racist abuse have no power or agency and are mere 2 dimensional foils for the humour. 

In Little Britain USA we encounter the American equivalent of Marjorie, Blanche Chuckatuck, who visits the UK group. She also abuses Meera then says she’s got to go to her next meeting, and dresses up in her Ku Klux Klan garb. Again the black and brown characters are just foils for the real stars of the show - the racist characters. 

Another Lucas and Walliams character, Maggie Blackamoor, vomits if she discovers that anyone involved in the preparation of the food she has eaten isn’t white or is married to a black person while Linda Flint, a university counsellor, describes students using racial slurs including ching chong Chinaman and Ali Bongo. In Come Fly with Me we’re introduced to Chief Immigration Officer Ian Foot, who targets black and brown people as well as “foreigners”. When his colleague Taaj Manzoor rightly accuses Foot of racism, Foot has the last word, accusing Taaj of being “anti-white” and puts his name on a list of people he feels threaten the security of the country (which he says also includes Hardeep Singh Kohli, Mark Ramprakash and Konnie Huq).

Another rib-tickler: police racism. Officer Lindsay, a retired-police-officer-come-driving-instructor, tells his white learner driver student “now on yer way yer black bastard”. Series regular Andy, in his wheelchair steals a child’s coin operated ride from a store and is caught on CCTV. But the US police facial composite shows Andy with black skin. “Black fella did it”, says Andy.

And then there’s the black face. Lucas blacks up to play Reverend Jesse King, an American pastor on foreign exchange from Harlem. Walliams blacks up for Desiree DeVere who gets into fights with Bubbles, her (white) husband’s white first wife. In one such scrap Desiree loses her wig. Bubbles snatches it up and wears it as pubic hair. 

Ting Tong Macadangdang is a Thai bride who was "ordered" via a magazine by Dudley Punt. One by one Dudley discovers Ting Tong's secrets: she's a ladyboy called Tong Ting from tooting, her mother has come to live with them and is hiding in a kitchen cupboard, she has more than one husband. Each time Dudley threatens to send Ting tong home. Each time she begs him, "Pwease Mr Dudwey", on her knees, her face in his groin.

The examples I’ve cited are just a few of the most memorable. Even the gallery below is incomplete.

Little Britain’s amazing success is charted by Walliams, Lucas and their friend Boyd Hilton in the book Inside Little Britain: from BBC Radio 4, to BBC television, to HBO, with merchandise deals, film rights and an Australian tour.

According to their book, in 2005 Little Britain was in the top five watched shows, with more than ten million people tuning in. They sold 3.5 million DVDs. The Little Britain: Live UK tour sold out a year in advance: 800,000 ticket-holders, 211 shows. 

And then, in early 2007 Little Britain: Live came to Australia with over 150,000 ticket-holders, a 32 arena show. 

I’ve watched film footage of Little Britain: Live shows; it’s striking how overwhelmingly white the audience is.

What about the production team? Why had nobody realised how racist some of these sketches were?

During my Little Britain weekend marathon I examined the show credits and noted people Lucas and Walliams thank in their book. I’ve listed people involved in script writing and at producer level or above here. I was struck how those at the upper levels of the production process mirrored Lucas and Walliams’ overwhelmingly white audience.

In Inside Little Britain (page 36) there’s an uncomfortable moment when Matt Lucas tests out his character Sir Bernard Chumley on the audience at Comedy Café on London’s Rivington Street: “what Matt didn’t expect was booing. A joke about Sir Bernard having curry was misinterpreted by the Comedy Café crowd as racist”.

In the documentary Little Britain Down Under, Lucas gets “suddenly quite nervous” about whether the audience will “get it” just before he goes on stage in Melbourne to perform his character Ting Tong live. What does he think it is they might not get? 

Walliams is quoted in their book saying “the days when white comedians portraying black characters automatically meant they were being racist were long gone”. 

This insensitivity is something Walliams has owned up to. He confesses in Little Britain Down Under that he likes things to be shocking. Speaking directly to camera about a segment of the show that sees him exposing an unwitting member of the audience’s backside he says: “yeah I love cruelty, it’s my favourite thing in the world. It didn’t start off like that, it kind of grew. You know as I became greedy for laughs. But you’ve got to know the boundaries. I mean that’s funny but if I started you know exposing their penis or something it would not. I don’t know it would just be horrible then. It would just be abuse.”

During the same documentary Walliams is handed a letter of complaint from a fan who had been sexually molested as a child and was motivated to write to him about his shock, dismay and disappointment at witnessing Walliams’ portrayal of the Little Britain character Des Kaye. Des Kaye is a children’s presenter who in the live show plays a game of “hide the sausage” and goes on to attempt to molest the younger of two unwitting audience members on-stage. 

Reacting to this complaint Walliams rationalises with “I suppose you know if it was a child it wouldn’t be funny but because it’s an adult on stage. To me there is no subjects that you can’t make jokes out of. Because if you make that line then you have to get rid of all comedy. Because you have to say that you know, there’s no point. Comedy can only do this, this, and this, and therefore you might as well not have it”.

Dr Simon Weaver, Senior Lecturer at Brunel University in his book The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking finds that “racist humour is a form of racist rhetoric that supports serious racism”. As far back as 1946, Dr John H Burma published an article in the American Sociological Review describing ethnic humour as a conflict device:

“Any persons or groups who are the butt of jokes thereby suffer discriminatory treatment and are indirectly being relegated to an inferior status. This is, in turn, typical of conflict in general and gives additional support to the fact that humour is one of the mechanisms rather frequently pressed into use in the racial conflicts of America.”

Over decades, academics have shown how racist humour is a powerful communicator of prejudice, how it validates belief systems, supports stereotypes and how comic repetition can reinforce and lock in prejudice and malice. 

All these things were known and understood, especially among the people who are the targets of racism. How on earth did the BBC think it was alright to invest so heavily in these shows?

Comedian Gina Yashere offers an answer: "the problem with comedy in the UK. It's all made by white people, commissioned by white people, for white people. If they allowed for black writers, producers, executives, or any black people ANYWHERE along the process, none of this shit would be happening now".

Yashere goes on: "this is how you judge whether your material is racist, people. If you can't do that material in a room full of the people you're talking about then your shit is racist, and you know it. And if you feel uncomfortable, you're uncomfortable because your shit is racist."

Apologies from Walliams and Lucas, while nice to see, don’t really cut it. The BBC needs to retire some of its comic talent and commissioners, refresh production and writing teams with people who have a different sense of “audience”. Had they done this decades ago, we might have enjoyed more of Gina Yashere (who found huge success instead in the US), more of Felix Dexter (a comedy genius wasted in Absolutely Fabulous before his early death). We might not have had to wait so long for Man Like Mobeen. 

Like comedian Judi Love said on Twitter the other day “can you just bring back Real McCoy…Get the original cast who started it and paved the way for some of us now to come back and create a new one! Join together old school and new school they can produce it, write it, direct it… And just in case you’re worried that it’s only going to be black people watching it, if you look at the marches you’re going to see there’s a lot of people that actually love the black culture.”

By guest writer- Elena Egawhary, PhD Candidate in Communications at Columbia University

With input from Clare Sambrook