DAN WOOTTON: Cancelling comedy like Little Britain puts us on path towards erasing our heritage

Little Britain fans were celebrating yesterday after the censorious BBC reinstated a newly edited woke version of the classic comedy onto its iPlayer service after being banned for two years.

But I wasn’t.

Yet again, this pathetically politically correct organisation has decided to play judge, jury and executioner over our cultural heritage.

By giving into the cancel culture mob – and editing out sequences from the show deemed inappropriate in our puritanical, identity politics-obsessed new era where Black Lives Matter ideology dominates liberal institutions – the Beeb has put itself on a slippery slope towards the sort of censorship of our culture heritage that we’re used to seeing in communist regimes.

Because here’s the issue: Almost all of Little Britain is offensive in one way or another to one group or another.

That’s the whole point of the show.

The best sort of comedy makes you gasp, guffaw and groan in equal measure.

It’s not real life. It shouldn’t be judged by the standards of polite society.

That’s comedy, right? Or at least it used to be.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re offended don’t bloody keep watching.

Little Britain 2022 has axed the David Walliams characters Pastor Jesse King and Desiree DeVere, which saw the white actor wear dark make-up, which is now referred to in these culture war debates as blackface.

Also gone is the Thai bride Ting Tong Macadangdang, played by Matt Lucas.

But perhaps what’s most telling is the controversial characters and scenes that the BBC don’t take issue with.

They have allowed ‘the only gay in the village’ Dafydd Thomas, also played by Lucas, to remain.

So too the transvestites Emily and Florence and the famed ‘I’m a lady’ catchphrase.

And wheelchair bound Lou and his carer Andy, and the Bristol teenager Vicky Pollard.

Which pen pusher at the BBC has the right to decide two comedians wearing make-up to portray another ethnicity is more offensive than two men pretending to be transvestites?

After all, Lucas has previously expressed his regrets at those scenes.

Speaking to The Big Issue in 2017, he said: ‘If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites…She was fun at the time but I think we look differently at the transgender community now and it would be very hard to do that.’

He added: ‘I wouldn’t play black characters. Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now. Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved.’

But the BBC has also left in other scenes that have previously been slammed as racist.

It includes the uni staffer Linda Flint describing a Chinese student to her boss Martin by saying she has ‘straight black hair, yellowish skin, slight smell of soy sauce – that’s it, the ching-chong Chinaman’.

Linda also says a feminist poetry student has ‘a few piercings, wears a lot of black, combat trousers – that’s right, the big, fat lesbian.’

And she says of a little person: ‘He looks up a lot, gets his clothes from Mothercare. That’s it, the Oompa-Loompa.’

Translation: According to the BBC, blackface is bad but casual racism against the Chinese, homophobia and dwarf discrimination is OK.

At least until the next hysterical social justice cause spreads across the world and uni students and woke warriors everywhere rush to erase our past.

And that’s the real issue with the retrospective editing of classic comedy, which has already seen the axe wielded against scenes in legendary sitcoms including Fawlty Towers, Allo! Allo!, Keeping Up Appearances and The Young Ones.

It’s also illustrative of the total contempt in which the BBC treats us, their audience.

Apparently we’re not smart enough to realise a show made in another decade is reflective of that period in history, with the inappropriate cultural quirks to match the era.

I’m a strong believer in that being one of the main ways we can learn; a way to acknowledge how far we’ve come as a society and which parts of our language have changed, not always for the better.

The cancellation of comedians has reached McCarthy era level dystopia in recent months.

Jimmy Carr and Dave Chapelle both faced international protests for making jokes on Netflix TV specials considered un-PC.

Roy Chubby Brown shows have been cancelled in English venues run by Labour councils, proving it’s the left who have taken the mantle from Mary Whitehouse when it comes to what we should be allowed to consume.

Jennifer Saunders says the seminal Absolutely Fabulous would never be made in today’s woke culture because TV executives ‘talk themselves out of stuff now because everything is so sensitive’.

And former left-wing comedy darling Russell Brand is the latest in the crosshairs for daring to challenge the mainstream media narrative throughout Covid-19 hysteria.

I keep thinking how these decisions will put the BBC in a complete and utter bind when it comes to period pieces in the future.

How could Mad Men – the greatest TV show in history, in my humble opinion – ever be made in this era, with its near constant portrayal of racism, sexism and homophobia, reflecting the reality of 1960s America pre-civil rights.

If Netflix were making the series today, they’d go down the Bridgerton route and replace Don Draper – the chauvinist but brilliant advertising executive played by Jon Hamm – with an equally talented exec portrayed by Idris Elba.

It’s all fantasy you see. Let’s pretend the world has always been a cosmopolitan hot pot and we’ll all feel better about ourselves.

The BBC has tried to justify its rank hypocrisy by censoring blackface on Little Britain but allowing many other isms to remain by saying: ‘Little Britain has been made available to fans on BBC iPlayer following edits made to the series by Matt and David that better reflect the changes in the cultural landscape over the last 20 years since the show was first made.’

That’s absolute rubbish, of course. Racism and homophobia were also unacceptable in 2003.

The difference is we knew how to laugh at ourselves back then and understood when something was a joke, not real life.

That’s why the BBC has made a fatal error by opening the Pandora’s box of trying to curate historic comedy to its ludicrously woke standards of 2022.

If the corporation’s enthusiastic censors continue at this rate don’t be surprised if the Little Britain episodes you see in a couple of years end up being five-minutes, with trigger warnings longer than the actual sketches.