[imagesource: BBC]

Visit The Telegraph’s home page at any given time, and you’re guaranteed to see multiple stories shouting about ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeism’.

You’ll also find vigorous defences of the Tories from people who think Harry and Meghan should have named their latest child Georgina Floyd.

It is, after all, unashamedly conservative.

Some of the cries about ‘cancel culture’ are laughable, but a recent list of “10 great comedies they wouldn’t make today” did raise a few interesting points.

Were Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to write The Office today, they would have to tone down many of the jokes that have since gone to become part of British comedy lexicon.

Via The Telegraph’s list, here’s what was said on that front:

David Brent was the ultimate inappropriate boss. He was also one of the greatest comedic creations of the last 20 years…

Yet its creator, Ricky Gervais, has said that the series – with its jokes about race, disability and “fat Keith” – probably wouldn’t get made today.

The problem is that cancel culture has obliterated people’s irony sensors, he says: “I think now it would suffer because people take things literally. There’s these outrage mobs who take things out of context. And the broadcasters have gotten more and more careful.”

Seth Rogen has a slightly different take on ‘cancel culture’, but let’s move on.

There are plenty of scenes from this compilation video that would have caused a big fuss on social media:

The same list also highlights that Absolutely Fabulous, Peep Show, Little Britain, and even Friends would have come under fire these days.

I certainly won’t be rewatching old Friends episodes to pick out what would be deemed as problematic, because I would rather do almost anything else with my time.

Now for a rather obvious one – Fawlty Towers:

Where to start? Anti-Spanish (Manuel), anti-German (the goose-stepping) or just lazily racist (Major Gowen discussing the West Indies cricket team), the greatest British comedy of all ticks just about every single non-compliance box you can think of.

Yet to watch it is to understand the difference between parody and mockery. That comes in the writing and the performances, but it’s unlikely they would have got as far as making it had it surfaced in 2021.

Again, those criticism seem fair, but if the show had not gone on, we would have been denied one of John Cleese’s greatest ever performances.

There’s much to enjoy below, but number six, featuring Basil Fawlty demonstrating with a woman about the view from her room window, is a genuine classic.

That starts from four minutes in:

In this imaginary scenario, we would also supposedly never have seen the likes of Will and Grace, The Inbetweeners, and Father Ted.

South African readers may recall we had something similar last year with Leon Schuster’s films being removed from Showmax, due in part to his use of ‘blackface’.

Schuster has sent out some mixed messages on that front, saying that he was shocked and didn’t believe his work caused any harm following Showmax’s decision.

However, two years earlier, he said that he was told to stay away from blackface by black people, adding “you’ve got to listen” and admitting it was “just racist”.

Somewhere out there, Helen Zille lowers her glasses and shouts ‘Stay Woke, Go Broke’ to nobody in particular.

[source:telegraph]