THE REVOLUTION EVENTUALLY DEVOURS ITS OWN: John Cleese Slams Removal of Fawlty Towers Episode From Streaming Site.
On Friday, BBC-owned TV network UKTV announced on Twitter that it had temporarily removed an episode of “Fawlty Towers,” “The Germans,” from its Gold download service as it contained “racial slurs.” The service said it wished to “review” the episode, and “consider our options.” It said some shows “carry warnings and others are edited.”
It is believed the “racial slurs” are contained in a scene in which the character known as the Major uses the N-word when referring to Caribbean sportsmen.
Speaking to Australian newspaper The Age, Cleese said: “The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?”
He slammed BBC executives for yielding to pressure from protesters. “A lot of the people in charge now at the BBC just want to hang onto their jobs,” he said. “If a few people get excited they pacify them rather than standing their ground as they would have done 30 or 40 years ago.”
Monty Python was the culmination of the British left’s satire revolution of the 1960s. As Peter Hitchens wrote in his brilliant 1998 book, The Abolition of Britain, combined, these works were a cultural sea change in England:
Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On and TW3 created a tradition of ‘anti-establishment’ comedy which continued long after its roots were forgotten. There may still have been an ‘establishment ‘of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961.There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?
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It also made the middle class, especially the educated and well-off middle class, despise themselves and feel a sort of shame for their supposedly elitist prejudices, based upon injustice and undermined by their failure to defend the nation from its enemies in the era of appeasement. Thanks to this, in another paradox, they have often felt unable to defend things within Britain which they value and which help to keep them in existence, from the grammar schools to good manners. They are ashamed of being higher up the scale, though for most middle-class people this is more a matter of merit than birth, and nothing to be ashamed of at all.
I love the original Monty Python series and have seen every episode countless times (though I’m not as crazy about the last season, when Cleese had left the show), but it was a full-on BBC-endorsed assault on traditional English values. Funny how when your goal is fundamental transformation, sometimes what you rue what you end up with. But then, as I’ve written before, John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.