This episode I remember won both channel 4s and channel 5s top 100 funniest tv episode in history. Beating both Morecambe and Wise Christmas and Only fools and horses, dell falling though the bar to second and third places.
And now it's been wiped from existence. The voted funniest television episode ever created.
You can still get it on Netflix. I watched it last night to remind myself what the fuss is about. The Major is chatting with Basil about cricket and uses two words which I will not repeat here, to describe the Indian and the West Indian teams. Even Basil thinks the Major's lost it, and clearly the piss is being taken out of the Major's antediluvian attitudes. We laugh at him and those attitudes too. No mistaking that.
I also watched an episode of 'Life on Mars' yesterday. For anyone who's not seen it, it was a two-series run about a present day detective who's in a traffic accident, slips into a coma and then wakes up in 1973. He's still the same guy, and still a detective. The two series were made around 2006 and 2007.
In this particular episode, a young black detective enters the squad room. The other detectives there, all of whom are white and have the totally unreconstructed sexist and racist attitudes that were typical of the time, of course, all start having a pop at the new guy, again using terms I will not repeat. The new guy takes it well enough, and then, in order to get himself onside with them, joins in with some racial self-parody and raises some laughs as a result.
It'd be easy to argue that both scenes are objectionable. But the Life on Mars episode isn't being pulled. At least, not yet. Maybe it's because it was made in the modern era and has a 'knowing' attitude to past prejudices. Maybe Fawlty Towers has been removed because it was simply a reflection of when it was made (1975.)
If one's to be banned and not the other, it displays, at best, confused thinking. And at worst, hypocrisy. But then again, and coming from the modern commentariat, that would hardly be a surprise.
