Maybe too strong a word, but remember in Auf Wiedersehen Pet when they all go into town drinking? I think most of them go off with prostitutes and it doesn't seem to be regarded as "an issue" at all.

I'm pro-legal brothels and all, and it would have been preposterous for a bunch of pissed up blokes to have a philosophical discussion. But it seemed funny, in a programme with basically humane values.

Shocked and stunned, I was.

"Sex is in its infancy in Gateshead."

Anyway: I guess I'd nominate the "Paki" stuff in Only Fools And Horses. Even at the time I thought "What the fuck?"

(Again, perhaps, because the show struck me as basically humane.)

But the "p" word was slung about with abandon back then though, wasn't it, even by people you wouldn't see as racist? Terry McCann from off of Minder could similarly be less than sound in his linguistics ("that's enough gunga-din" and the like), and if any TV character was the essence of late 70s/early80s earthy humane decency it was him.

Not that I'm defending it, like. It does shock.

Wayne declines the offer of accompanying his mates, as I recall, in favour of going on the pull at the local discotheque, declaring "I ain't paying for mine".

Not that I have an encyclopedic mind for lines from Auf Wiedersehen Pet, you understand.

Why on Earth... wrote:
Anyway: I guess I'd nominate the "Paki" stuff in Only Fools And Horses. Even at the time I thought "What the fuck?"

That's references to "the Paki shop" and cheeky-grin "ooh Mr Singh, saw your wife the other day, she's got a terrible spot in the middle of her forehead"-type joshing, right? I mean, unfortunate old-days stuff rather than condoned spite? There was generally an anti-racist tone to OFAH, wasn't there, even though some of the actual language sounds dodgy now.

I know it's an Alf Garnett style "look at the stupid racist" thing, but I recall being a bit taken aback when Old Man Steptoe started going on about "wogs", was upbraided by Harold, and replied "it's a free country, isn't it? I can say what I like and what I don't like. And I don't like wogs." I don't think that one's been shown for a while - it seemed pretty crazy that the BBC showed it in the early 90s, when the censoring of old TV comedy had already begun in earnest.

What E10 said about Terry. I have to stop referring to him as though he's a real person. As I need to with Wayne. Though I'm sure he and Mumpo took me out for a drink once.

"Paki" is overdubbed when that episode is shown now. Which is about twice a day.

Oh yeah, and I can remember being a bit startled even in the early/mid 80s when The Two Ronnies did a sketch with R. Corbett as a sheik or something, being served a jar of Robertsons jam by R. Barker the grocer, who pointed at the label and said "ooh look, there's one of your little friends on there" - huge laugh from the studio audience. I mean, that wasn't unfortunate old-tymey language conventions, that was just racist tripe. Worse for the way it didn't differentiate between black and Arab (or whatever Corb was supposed to be - he wasn't black, I remember that much), just slung together all the non-white peoples of the Earth as golliwogs. This was when Jim Davidson was still a regular on our TV screens, and when I still spent much of my time in a school playground, and it still made me jump.

As for "the p-word being slung about with abandon" in the 1980s, I was in a taxi near West Bromwich just the other day, and the driver was going on about his visits to The Hawthorns: "I always go in the Paki pub, lovely curries they do in there, really nice people". Very hard to know how to react when people do that "racist language without racist intent" thing. I sort of expect it from my mum, as she's 70 and never got the PC memo, but this bloke was about 40 at the most.

I've an elderly neighbour who does like that taxi driver. I rather pointedly say "Asian" afterwards, but it's a waste of time. She's a really nice person, and gets on with her Bengali neighbours who bring her curries sometimes.There was even one disruptive Bengali bloke who got evicted and she was nice to him.

Anyone ever seen the episode of Don't Wait Up where a doctor being black is the source of great hilarity?

Tubby Isaacs wrote:
Anyone ever seen the episode of Don't Wait Up where a doctor being black is the source of great hilarity?
And Fawlty Towers.

Part of that was seeing it through Basil's eyes, maybe. He's all over the place at the best of times and had a knock on the head.

In Don't Wait Up it seems to be reasonable that Dr Latimer's patients wouldn't be happy with a black doctor.

It's quite amusing that George Layton, writer of Don't Wait Up, nicked the idea from Fawlty Towers. And made it worse.

Taylor wrote:
As for "the p-word being slung about with abandon" in the 1980s, I was in a taxi near West Bromwich just the other day, and the driver was going on about his visits to The Hawthorns: "I always go in the Paki pub, lovely curries they do in there, really nice people". Very hard to know how to react when people do that "racist language without racist intent" thing. I sort of expect it from my mum, as she's 70 and never got the PC memo, but this bloke was about 40 at the most.
It still is very much in use once you leave London.

And Wayne's strong moral stance is rewarded, of course, by the fact that he gets to shag Lysette Anthony.

There was a social and character-based context to Del (and it was Del, rather than Rodney) using the term "Paki shop" and the like though. It didn't mean Del the character was racist but he was much less likely to be conscious of and bothered by those things than Rodney, who in the early days of Only Fools was a bit of an agitated, if directionless, typical early 80s lefty, sounding off about nuclear weapons and unemployment, in contrast to his more material-aspirational brother.

It's a shame Only Fools has been reduced in the pop-cultural memory to Del Boy falling through the bar and Uncle Albert going "during the war..." every 10 seconds, as those early series had a lot about them.

Good points.

To give a nice bit of symmetry to what you say, I think Del says "Paki shop" while they're in a nuclear bomb shelter.

One of the yuppie episodes was on last night. Before Del falls through the bar:

Del: You need to talk about money to these birds, Trig.

Trig: (approaching woman) you seen one of those new five pound notes?

Close.

Trig: "I saw one of those old five pound notes the other day".

That was the start of a three week spell of OFAH that was as consistently brilliant as any comedy has been before or since. That one, the blow-up dolls and winning the holiday in Spain. Untouchably great, however jaded we may be by Del falling through the bar and the Batman & Robin nonsense that came later.

E10R's been 100% right here and on the 57+3 thread as well.

E10R's been 100% right here and on the 57+3 thread as well.

Wise words, particularly as I don't think I've written anything on that other thread. Though rest assured that, had I done so, it would have been drawn deeply from a well of 100 per cent proof righteousness.

For the 'casual racism' kind of stuff, surely one of the worst is Spike Milligan, since he basically meant it. (Not that Jim Davidson didn't, of course.) But for a kid who hadn't (yet) looked into Milligan's background and near-as-damnit worshipped him, it was amusing at first, but then became increasingly sinister.

So I don't know if it was really 'shock' - more of a growing unease.

When I first saw the thread title, I actually jumped to the conclusion it was going to be about film, so I'm going to change tack a few times in quick succession now.

Sticking with TV 'light entertainment', there was the time on 'Crackerjack' where Peter Glaze - perhaps under instruction to make the programme more edgy, or perhaps floundering for an improvised rhyme - completed a rhyming ditty with the line "I couldn't give a toss!". I wasn't so shocked, but the live audience of children went strangely quiet. It was like one of Crusty's fauxs pas on 'The Simpsons'.

A slightly different kind of shock was over a couple of sitcom episodes: the very last episode of 'Blackadder', where I was more shocked with myself, I think, over how susceptible I was to the tearjerking devices at the very end, when I really didn't think I would be. They didn't actually do that much, thinking about it, but they basically 'broke the dam' of the entire nation. I'm particularly susceptible to images of fields of poppies and war cemeteries, though. Similarly, there was that - for me - totally unexpected scene of gravitas in the ‘lost episode’ of ‘Dad’s Army’, where the men really think they’re on the new front line and they start confronting their mortality in their conversation. That was a strange one, but brilliant with it. Peculiar that it got ‘withdrawn’, therefore, I think.

However, when I saw the title, I immediately thought of some scenes from horror films that I found particularly disturbing – probably because I was in my teens or early 20s at the time. Mind you, I find them no less disturbing now. In fact, being forewarned, I’d probably look away now. One is the opening(?) scene to Almodovar’s ‘Matador’, where the protagonist is wanking himself off in a bath whilst watching horrible snuff films of women being sliced up on circular saws and the like. The other was the scene in Romero’s ‘Martin’, where the eponymous antihero drugs, rapes and slashes the wrists of a woman to fulfil his vampire fantasies. Both of those left me quite shaken up – partly because I’m simply squeamish, but partly because I really don’t like seeing/hearing violence against women.

Anyone ever seen the episode of Don't Wait Up where a doctor being black is the source of great hilarity?

Yeah, we did Don't Wait Up at work a few years ago & tbh it's quite funny, but we were all shocked at that bit. There was also a really sexist bit with a secretary and my favourite, where Tom & Toby attend a party at their gay neighbours' flat & spend the whole time desperately asserting that they are father & son & not a couple honest.