A controversial Little Britain sketch is “explicitly racist and outdated”, and it is surprising it is still available on BBC iPlayer, according to audience research by Ofcom.
The regulator showed people a number of clips of television as part of a study into audience expectations on potentially offensive content across linear TV and streaming services.
One sketch from Little Britain, originally broadcast in 2002 and available on iPlayer, shows David Walliams as university employee Linda Flint describing an Asian student, Kenneth Lao, over the phone to her manager.
He is described as having “yellowish skin, slight smell of soy sauce … the ching-chong China man.”
The scene is accompanied by a laugh track.
I wasn’t a fan at the time - it felt like they did far too much punching down and had failed to properly learn the lessons of The Fast Show (as did a lot of sketch shows that followed in its wake that thought all you really needed was a catchphrase).
Wait what was wrong with the Fast Show?
It had the same ten jokes every week.
Well, that was the point. The jokes built on the situations from the previous show. It wasn’t literally the same joke, it was an ever increasingly weirder variation. That’s what sketch shows are. Same with Goodness Gracious Me.
I thought maybe someone was saying it was racist.
Even at the time it looked very outdated.
Yes, I was trying to get my head around the main conclusion:
As it felt very seventies (and, no, doing it ironically doesn’t help) but has society really moved on? Either from the seventies or naughties?