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CURRY & CHIPS
ITV, 1969
Written by Johnny Speight
Starring: Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes,
Norman Rossington, Kenny Lynch, Geoffrey Hughes
Episodes/Series: 6 episodes/1 series
"How the hell did he get away with that?!"
Watch Loretta & Jake react to Curry & Chips
Curry & Chips © LWT/ITV 1969
Warning:
The following article contains uncensored racist remarks that may offend readers.
The most ludicrous, outrageous, tasteless sitcom ever?
Curry & Chips is perhaps the most controversial of Britain’s ‘racial’ and offensive sitcoms. However, it is equally the most obscure.
While Johnny Speight’s other contentious sitcom juggernaut Till Death Us Do Part and Love Thy Neighbour will come out top of any internet search for racist British comedy, Curry & Chips has been locked firmly away in the archive vaults and for very good reason.
Written by Johnny Speight, and based on an idea by revered comedian Spike Milligan, the show was one of London Weekend Television’s (LWT) first productions and one of the first TV programmes to be made and broadcast in colour.
Speight was apparently inspired to write the series after the ‘fever-pitch’ response to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.*
The series is set in the canteen and on the factory floor of Lillicrap, Ltd., a manufacturer of cheap novelty toys and souvenirs in the Midlands.
It starred comedy legend Eric Sykes as the factory foreman, the programme’s ‘voice of reason’ Arthur Blenkinsop, Norman Rossington (The Army Game, Carry On…) as the xenophobic shop steward, Kenny Lynch, Geoffrey Hughes (Keeping Up Appearances, The Royle Family) and Spike Milligan who “blacked-up” especially to play the sitcom’s protagonist, Kevin O’Grady, a Pakistani-Irish immigrant, "fondly" called 'Paki Paddy', looking for a job.
The concept was a brazen one and TV regulators agreed, with the ITA (The Independent Television Authority), the precursor to Ofcom, ordering the show’s cancellation after just six episodes, spurred by complaints from viewers and the Race Relations Board.
Johnny Speight, in the show’s defence, said:
“It was the English who were made to look bigoted in the show, but the people at the ITA couldn’t understand that.”
But there were a lot more flaws in the show’s production and writing that ultimately led to its downfall…
A bold attempt at exemplifying racism in society, that inevitably backfired
Johnny Speight and Spike Milligan’s intention for Curry & Chips was to ridicule ‘native working-class attitudes to immigration using stereotypes’** and ethnic signifiers to aid their humour. The satirising of these attitudes aimed to create a ‘reverse semantic effect’ that offered empathy for migrants and undermined the mindset exemplified by the native working-class.**
The series – like other preceding and succeeding sitcoms of the same era – set out to reflect and capitalise on the tensions in society in regard to multiculturalism, the migration of African and south-Asian migrants to England and the country’s volatile and insecure relationship with Ireland and its other former colonies. With Milligan incorporating many of his own fears and anxieties about immigration and overpopulation into his own portrayal of the character Kevin O’Grady.**
In doing so, Speight and Milligan considered the satirising of these issues, through the series, one which criticised extreme political views and put British culture’s xenophobic attitudes under examination, beneficial to reforming race relations in Britain.
However, despite garnering popularity with viewers for displaying these cultural attitudes towards race and immigration, this appeal instead reinforced, rather than reformed, the political attitudes of its audience.
Hence, the series, for the most part, derived its humour from its incongruity – through Milligan’s portrayal of an ‘uncultured’ Pakistani man, incessantly asserting his Irish heritage, while simultaneously asserting his hatred of Pakistanis: “There are far too many wogs in this country” – and it’s shocking and unexpected vulgarity – an unrelenting barrage of racial slurs: “wogs”, “coons” and “piccaninnies”, to name but a few, from the white characters, but also, most surprisingly, the series’ sole black character, played by Kenny Lynch. Outrageous humour of which the studio audience revelled in incessantly.
To counteract this, the sitcom established familiarity with many viewers by reflecting many of their lived experiences, including: arguments on the average industrial factory floor, men’s banter in the canteen and regular trips to the pub. Hence, adhering to comedy’s general manifesto, as an ‘invitation to belong’.***
Like Till Death Us Do Part before it, Curry & Chips produced comedy that not only mimicked the exclusions and inclusions experienced in society but re-established them by dividing the audience between those who understood the humour and those who did not.** In doing so, it reinforced the stigma of outsiders as people to be ridiculed and provided a belonging for the audience who found those jokes pleasurable.****
An outcry from viewers and racial organisations alike, but not entirely for the reasons you might think…
Curry & Chips inevitably drew predominantly negative reviews, but not for its racist and despicable attitudes towards Pakistanis – which was, for the most part, overlooked – but for its frequent use of swearing, specifically the word ‘bloody’ which was used an astounding 59 times in one episode. So contentious was the issue that Eric Sykes flat-out refused to swear once throughout the series’ run.
However, organisations representing ethnic minorities did take issue to the show’s racist representation, with audiences of a variety of different ethnic backgrounds agreeing unanimously that it was insulting to Pakistani migrants and migrants in general. Even members of regional broadcasters who transmitted the programme found its content off-putting and disconcerting.**
Despite attempting to placate hostility towards the programme by shifting the series to a post-watershed time slot (10:30pm), cancelling its broadcast in Ulster and suggesting Spike Milligan be replaced by a Pakistani actor, the ITA cancelled the series after its final episode on Boxing Day 1969.
A subsequent survey found that contrary to Speight and Milligan’s desire for the series to improve race relations in the UK, 88 percent of viewers found the programme’s portrayal of ‘coloured’ people to not be ‘objectionable at all’ and 83 percent of viewers’ attitudes towards coloured people remained apathetic and unchanged.**
Thus, the show’s humour as a whole reinforced existing ethnic stereotypes and left unchallenged the perception of migrants as being undesirable outsiders.**
A contemporary reviewer suggests that while Curry & Chips attempted to raise important questions:
“it lacked a strong enough voice to challenge the racist attitudes of its characters.” – Ali Jaafar, Screen Online (2003-14)
The fate of Curry & Chips and Spike Milligan’s continued attempts to “black-up”
LWT did attempt to revive and capitalise upon Curry & Chips once again in 1971, contacting the ITA to see if they would consider repeating the original series or, ideally, commission a second. However, still scarred by the uproar generated two years earlier, their request was rejected and the series was consigned to television history forever.
Alas, Curry & Chips would not mark the end of Britain’s obsession with race comedies, in fact it was only the beginning. Till Death Us Do Part returned for a successful second run in the early 1970s, accompanied by Love Thy Neighbour (1972-1976), which – ironically – did not once trigger the ITA’s alarm bells throughout its run.
Spike Milligan wasn’t finished with blacking up and, undeterred, reappeared as Kevin O’Grady in an episode of Till Death Us Do Part, pertinently titled ‘Paki Paddy’ and a new BBC sitcom entitled The Melting Pot in 1975 again as a Pakistani immigrant, this time called Mr Van Gogh. However, despite a full series being filmed, only the pilot was ever aired as the BBC got cold feet and were disconcerted by the series’ racially insensitive nature.
Despite its limited lifespan, Curry & Chips hasn’t succumbed to complete oblivion. Unlike many TV programmes of the same time period, the show exists complete in the archives, its notoriety perhaps granting it immunity from the videotape junking of that era, and its modern cultural significance renewing its amnesty in a world growing increasingly favourable towards the concept of ‘cancel culture’ and the desire to destroy, as opposed to, preserve our troubled and precarious comedy history.
Examples from Spike Milligan's two subsequent sitcoms: The Melting Pot (1975) and The Jewel in the Crown (1985) - a pilot written by Johnny Speight - which didn't achieve Curry & Chips' comparative longevity, emphasising Milligan's obvious enjoyment at blacking up
* Malik, S. (2002) Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television. London: California: SAGE.
** Bebber, B. (2014) ‘The Short Life of Curry and Chips: Racial Comedy on British Television in the 1960s’. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11(2-3), pp. 213-235.
*** Medhurst, A. (2007) A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities. London: Routledge.
**** Gay, P. (1993) The Cultivation of Hatred. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 369-70.
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