Post by Dan Dare on Dec 11, 2022 16:06:06 GMT
To take a reliable reading on where you are it is sometimes helpful to establish a sound bearing where you are starting from.
Brits of a certain age (and perhaps a few others) will almost certainly recognise that the title is a riff on a very popular TV sitcom from the 1970s that - it seems almost surreal now – extended to eight series and provided the launch pad for at least post-series musical career in the pop music field. It Ain’t Half Hot Mum operated on a number of different levels. At the time it was transmitted, many Britons would have had recent experience of service in one or another hot and humid locale, ranging from Aden, to Bahrain, to Singapore or Hong Kong. If not personally, then almost certainly a close relative would have done, and would have no doubt regaled friends and family about the challenges involved when dealing with the natives in such places. Many Britons had such thoughts in mind when contemplating the natives who turned up, more or less out of the blue, and part of the genius of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and the secret behind its popular appeal, was in providing an outlet for such thoughts which, if expressed in real life, would have rendered the culprit liable to prosecution under the Race Relations Act. One of the mysteries of the age is how the BBC found itself able to fund and disseminate such a message, and how it was it managed to evade censure for quite so long.
But it’s not ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ itself which deserves our attention here, since it is in truth not ranked amongst the BBC’s most venerated achievements, but rather a production that took the title above for itself. “It Ain’t Half Racist Mum” was produced for the BBC’s “Open Door” open access slot, and transmitted in the spring of 1979, a few months before Margaret Thatcher swept to victory of a twin platform of getting Britain back to work and halting the swamping of Britain by unwanted migrants. As it happened, one of the Thatcher’s government’s first administrative actions was to sanction the admittance of 10,000 Vietnamese boat people, whose numbers have now swollen to well over 100,000 thanks to the magic of chain migration (and smugglers).
It Ain’t Half Racist Mum is remarkable on a number of fronts. The first is that although it was made only 40 years ago, it presents itself as a counter-establishment, even sub-Marxist piece of agit-prop. Viewing it today, one can only marvel at the extent at which the viewpoints expressed and the language used have since become staples of mainstream discourse.
The broadcast proper begins with archival footage of an interview by Malcolm Muggeridge with Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, I’m guessing sometime in the late 1960s (Reith died in 1971). Muggeridge, in trademark style, appears to be taking Reith to task for the BBC’s insistence on the continuing usage of ‘proper’ English in its news broadcasts particularly, with its characteristic of gentility and respectability, whereupon which Reith rounds on him asking “Well, is there anything wrong with that?” The programme producers evidently felt that Reith’s response was evidence of prima facie racism, even though it was probably more in fact class- rather than racially-oriented. Certainly anyone tuning into the BBC today, with its emphasis on ‘inclusivity’ would not draw such a conclusion these days. The contrast between Reith’s defence of decency and Britishness and the utterances of a more recent Director-General could hardly be more pronounced.
Next we have a first glimpse at It Ain’t Half Hot Mum itself, as well as the first appearance of Stuart Hall, the Jamaican Marxist academic who provides the linking commentary throughout the piece and who was one of the intellectual motors behind the project. Hall has since then become a ubiquitous figure in the race relations industry in the UK and, although in the programme he is described as being a professor at the Open University, he had for the previous ten years been Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, the closest approach that British academia has made so far in emulating the traditions of the Frankfurt School. A close listening to Hall’s contribution here will stir eerie echoes of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse et al.
I’m uncertain who the bird with the ginger Afro is, but wouldn’t mind betting that thirty years on she holds down a cushy number in the Sociology department of some minor university, or is involved in some quango or other as a diversity and equality outreach officer.
I couldn’t resist a wry smile at Hall’s attempt to head off the obvious question that would have arisen in viewers’ minds by this point: “If it’s so hellish for ethnics here in Britain, then why are you here?” We got the good old standby ‘You were there so now we’re here’ argument with the added bonus that ‘We were all invited anyway”.
The middle continues in similar vein closing on an extended moan about the ‘kid-glove treatment’ treatment given by the BBC interviewer to John Kingsley Read, the now long-forgotten leader of the National Party, itself a short-lived spin-off from the National Front.
And then Part 3, a right-on snooze-fest remarkable only for the edited ‘highlights’ of a 1978 television debate ‘The Question of Immigration’, chaired by the late Robin Day, and with Enoch Powell front and centre, looking like the cat that got the cream.
And that’s just about it. All that remains is to reiterate the earlier comment that what was viewed as nihilistic and neo-marxist agit-prop only a generation ago has now become the standard form for mainstream discourse. The Long March has reached the Terminus.
Brits of a certain age (and perhaps a few others) will almost certainly recognise that the title is a riff on a very popular TV sitcom from the 1970s that - it seems almost surreal now – extended to eight series and provided the launch pad for at least post-series musical career in the pop music field. It Ain’t Half Hot Mum operated on a number of different levels. At the time it was transmitted, many Britons would have had recent experience of service in one or another hot and humid locale, ranging from Aden, to Bahrain, to Singapore or Hong Kong. If not personally, then almost certainly a close relative would have done, and would have no doubt regaled friends and family about the challenges involved when dealing with the natives in such places. Many Britons had such thoughts in mind when contemplating the natives who turned up, more or less out of the blue, and part of the genius of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and the secret behind its popular appeal, was in providing an outlet for such thoughts which, if expressed in real life, would have rendered the culprit liable to prosecution under the Race Relations Act. One of the mysteries of the age is how the BBC found itself able to fund and disseminate such a message, and how it was it managed to evade censure for quite so long.
But it’s not ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ itself which deserves our attention here, since it is in truth not ranked amongst the BBC’s most venerated achievements, but rather a production that took the title above for itself. “It Ain’t Half Racist Mum” was produced for the BBC’s “Open Door” open access slot, and transmitted in the spring of 1979, a few months before Margaret Thatcher swept to victory of a twin platform of getting Britain back to work and halting the swamping of Britain by unwanted migrants. As it happened, one of the Thatcher’s government’s first administrative actions was to sanction the admittance of 10,000 Vietnamese boat people, whose numbers have now swollen to well over 100,000 thanks to the magic of chain migration (and smugglers).
It Ain’t Half Racist Mum is remarkable on a number of fronts. The first is that although it was made only 40 years ago, it presents itself as a counter-establishment, even sub-Marxist piece of agit-prop. Viewing it today, one can only marvel at the extent at which the viewpoints expressed and the language used have since become staples of mainstream discourse.
The broadcast proper begins with archival footage of an interview by Malcolm Muggeridge with Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, I’m guessing sometime in the late 1960s (Reith died in 1971). Muggeridge, in trademark style, appears to be taking Reith to task for the BBC’s insistence on the continuing usage of ‘proper’ English in its news broadcasts particularly, with its characteristic of gentility and respectability, whereupon which Reith rounds on him asking “Well, is there anything wrong with that?” The programme producers evidently felt that Reith’s response was evidence of prima facie racism, even though it was probably more in fact class- rather than racially-oriented. Certainly anyone tuning into the BBC today, with its emphasis on ‘inclusivity’ would not draw such a conclusion these days. The contrast between Reith’s defence of decency and Britishness and the utterances of a more recent Director-General could hardly be more pronounced.
Next we have a first glimpse at It Ain’t Half Hot Mum itself, as well as the first appearance of Stuart Hall, the Jamaican Marxist academic who provides the linking commentary throughout the piece and who was one of the intellectual motors behind the project. Hall has since then become a ubiquitous figure in the race relations industry in the UK and, although in the programme he is described as being a professor at the Open University, he had for the previous ten years been Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, the closest approach that British academia has made so far in emulating the traditions of the Frankfurt School. A close listening to Hall’s contribution here will stir eerie echoes of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse et al.
I’m uncertain who the bird with the ginger Afro is, but wouldn’t mind betting that thirty years on she holds down a cushy number in the Sociology department of some minor university, or is involved in some quango or other as a diversity and equality outreach officer.
I couldn’t resist a wry smile at Hall’s attempt to head off the obvious question that would have arisen in viewers’ minds by this point: “If it’s so hellish for ethnics here in Britain, then why are you here?” We got the good old standby ‘You were there so now we’re here’ argument with the added bonus that ‘We were all invited anyway”.
The middle continues in similar vein closing on an extended moan about the ‘kid-glove treatment’ treatment given by the BBC interviewer to John Kingsley Read, the now long-forgotten leader of the National Party, itself a short-lived spin-off from the National Front.
And then Part 3, a right-on snooze-fest remarkable only for the edited ‘highlights’ of a 1978 television debate ‘The Question of Immigration’, chaired by the late Robin Day, and with Enoch Powell front and centre, looking like the cat that got the cream.
And that’s just about it. All that remains is to reiterate the earlier comment that what was viewed as nihilistic and neo-marxist agit-prop only a generation ago has now become the standard form for mainstream discourse. The Long March has reached the Terminus.
