There’s a BBC 4 documentary on YouTube (uploaded in 2016) about the Black and White Minstrel Show – remember that? One of the pundits in the programme said the lesson to learn is that “you can never know what is going to happen in 20 years’ time, never mind in 50 years’ time”.
Nineteen centuries ago, the Roman historian Tacitus said this: rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis et quae dicere licet, which means “it’s a rare good fortune of the present times when you may think what you like, and it’s permitted to express those views”.
Pretty sobering to find that there was a point in Roman history which was more liberal and accommodating than our own (Tacitus was talking about the emperor Trajan, AD 98-117). One of the most conspicuous characteristics of our era is living in an age when banks have decided their customers have to think a certain way, when employers unhesitatingly sack anyone who makes an inadvertent comment that isn’t ‘on message’ as well as bring in trainers to tell them what to think and how to speak, and when anyone dares speak up on social media they are immediately torn to pieces by a pack of self-righteous wolves.
The reason I looked at the BBC documentary was because the other day I found a copy of a BBC book called The Black and White Minstrel Show, originally priced 7s 6d (37.5p). Now, I’m old enough to remember that show back in the days when it really was black and white because that’s all we had. We had two TV channels, BBC and ITV, and they didn’t start until the early evening and clocked off at about 10 pm.
For those who don’t know what I’m writing about, the Black and White Minstrel show essentially consisted of an extended medley of ensemble musical numbers (mainly show tunes) delivered by black-faced white male singers in minstrel costume, accompanied by white female dancers.
The Black and White Minstrel Show was staple viewing in the 1960s but now looking at the book which accompanied the show the whole concept is almost impossible to believe. It ran from 1957 (the year I was born) to 1978. It was last transmitted on July 21st 1978, by which time there were three channels, and colour had been around for several years.
Let’s just remember, this book was produced by an organisation, some of whose journalists and programme makers today make it very clear what they think and what everyone else should think.
But here in 1962 is the then Director of Television, Kenneth Adam (1908-78), waxing lyrical about how “N****** Minstrel Shows” were “a perfectly honourable and uncondescending convention”. He goes on, “Its revival in part on BBC Television in the 50s… was no kind of insult to the negro, though some misguided critics tried to make a political issue out of it.”
Yes, you read that right. I’ve transcribed it straight from the page. Interestingly, Adams’s Wikipedia page makes no mention of his enthusiasm for the show. He gurgled on in the book: “British audiences took to them [minstrels] at once. The less sophisticated European audiences found it breathtaking.” I bet they did.
By May 1961 the programme had a claimed audience of 16 million. At the time, Britain’s population was 53 million, making that 30% of the whole country watching it (and loving it). Not only that, it won the Golden Rose of Montreux that year.
In 1960 the show was trialled on stage in Scarborough. So successful was this that it became the first television production successfully transferred to the stage, with advance bookings running into what would now be millions of pounds.
The BBC’s book features a history of black face, with this gem of a description by the chapter’s author, Gladys H. Davies, identified elsewhere in the book as the show’s vision mixer:
There must have been a bond of sympathy between the negroes and the Minstrels. It is noticeable that, even though a large part of minstrel humour is based on caricature of the negroes, and their supposed characteristics of credulity and stupidity, their jokes were never unkind, and seem never to have been taken amiss by their ‘darkies’.
She was enthusiastic about the tradition of black face minstrel entertainment in America and its reception in Britain, especially the arrival of an American minstrel called Gene Stratton in 1884, known as ‘The Whistling C***’ (as she describes him, and that doesn’t rhyme with ‘punt’ but with ‘moon’). Later on, she assures readers that the television version had “brought a new and exciting lease of life to the ‘knights of the burnt cork'” (a reference to how black face was achieved through burning cork).
The book makes for an extraordinary read, yet it belongs to my lifetime. There is no doubt about the belief in its pages that the BBC was putting on a fantastically entertaining and professional show, greeted and enjoyed by millions of people in this country and abroad, and that epic amounts of hard work went into making creating, orchestrating and performing its extravagant sequences.
Of course, the BBC has long since changed its tune, with a webpage now dedicated to how it was the Corporation’s most glaring failure when it came to trading in stereotypes. Indeed, despite the show’s popularity there were already plenty of people by the 1960s who objected to the programme on the obvious basis that it was both insulting and racist. The writing was on the wall.
But the BBC wasn’t interested back then. According to that same BBC webpage, in 1962 Oliver Whitley, then Chief Assistant to the Director-General of the BBC, Sir Hugh Greene, said “The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: ‘On this issue, we can see your point, but in your own best interests, for heaven’s sake, shut up. You are wasting valuable ammunition on a comparatively insignificant target.'”
Not only then were some of the people keen on pushing the show inclined to dismiss anyone who dared to criticise it, but they also actively wanted to silence anyone who disagreed.
Thanks to its popularity, and the money made from the stage version, the show soldiered on right up until the late 1970s before it was dropped from the TV schedules. Even that had more to do with moving away from variety shows than anything else. In 1986 during the Corporation’s 50th anniversary of BBC television the show was omitted from the celebrations.
But it carried on as a stage show until 1989.
My point here has is not specifically about the Black and White Minstrel show or to attack the BBC, but the underlying phenomenon of how dramatically attitudes can change, and the shifting tides of tolerance and intolerance.
The Black and White Minstrel Show serves as a salutary allegorical tale of how little that defines or characterises an era or culture lasts. Most will dissipate in a puff of smoke to be supplanted by new obsessions, new angles and new prejudices, while some of the culprits stand around wringing their hands and wailing “what on earth were we thinking?”
Rather than a cavalcade of gratitude from future generations, it’s much more likely we’ll be mocked and roundly condemned for some of what is going on at present just as the Black and White Minstrel show is now. And you don’t need me to tell you what that might include. The only question is where to start?
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Sir Lenworth of Henry was a regular guest in the later years – as an up and coming professional, there was clearly no such thing as bad publicity.
That show was never really my cup of tea and even though I am probably a horrid racist I personally don’t find the spectacle of people dressing up as black people and dancing around especially interesting or edifying. But if people want to stage it and watch it, good luck to them. How do others here feel? If we think this show should not now be “allowed” on TV, should we also ban anything else where people are pretending to be someone of a different race? Why would the answer change depending on which races were being lampooned/impersonated? Isn’t the obvious answer that people who object to poking fun at blacks but not for example at Japanese are basically racists because they worry that there is some dark truth in there? Isn’t that incredibly patronising?
Tolerance is accepting things with which you personally don’t agree.
If something doesn’t bother you, then not minding it doesn’t require tolerance and doesn’t make you tolerant.
The so-called liberals – the anything goes set with no moral centre, any level of debauchery, vileness, affront to society – claim we are intolerant if we don’t have the same turpitude as they.
Indeed. I still sense a certain bien pensant reluctance to accept offensiveness on the part of some DS writers and those of like mind. I to some extent share that, and certainly do not go out of my way to be what I consider “offensive”. But I think we need to start from the position that being offensive is not illegal and must not be censored. If you start to get squeamish, that’s when the trouble starts.
Offence is taken not given. The permanently offended can find offence in a handful of dirt.
Stick and stones etc
We need to get back to that
“…but the underlying phenomenon of how dramatically attitudes can change, and the shifting tides of tolerance and intolerance.”
No.
Attitudes didn’t change, they were changed by the tide of intolerance from those who have colonise our media and institutions, who insist we must think like they do and how they tell us, and have conditioned and brainwashed children and society for the last 50 years
If we were a tolerant society, the B&W Minstrels would still be on telly, as those who found it entertaining would be tolerated.
I recall the programme as a child. I didn’t like it because I couldn’t see the sense in the black make-up – I found it creepy in fact – and didn’t like the music. In those days Black people were as scarce as hens’ teeth in monocultural Britain. The only Blacks most people saw were on the excellent documentaries about Africa by Armand and Michaela Denis.
My parents liked the show. I asked my father why they wore Black make-up, what was the point of it. He shrugged and said it’s just what they do.
We are being backed further and further into a corner with regard to what it is now ‘acceptable’ to say, read, hear, watch, do and think.
Well I do know what is going to happen in 20 years time, British people will be fleeing to North Korea seeking political asylum.
Never mind 20 years, how about a hundred?
1920, my grandfather George Hall is washing cars with two of his mates.outside Brown and Mallileu garage in Blackpool.
Frank says he’s borrowed £500 off his parents to build his first house on Central Drive. Bill has just completed an engineering apprenticeship and wants to build sidecars. Both invited grandad to join them.
No thanks, he says. He had joined up for WW1 at 15 and was reposted from the front line to the Royal Signals. He wanted to explore radio.
Bill set up Swallow Sidecars on Cocker St, later becoming Jaguar Cars with a knighthood as Sir William Lyons.
Frank Taylor was the T in Taylor Woodrow.
Grandad? Became a pioneer of radio, invented the worlds first wind up torch, and a founder member of the BBC when it was a club for radio enthusiasts.
He wouldn’t recognise it now.
Like a couple of others here, I wasn’t keen on the MOR shmalzy music, being young and trendy. But my parents watched because it was peak viewing on Saturday, and the songs were mostly from their formative years, ergo nostalgic. Dad was a semi-pro musician whose idols were genuine black musicians – Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter.
My in-laws loved it, my wife told me, because they loved light music: The Minstrels and Mantovani occupied the same mental space.
“Lampooning” was never the issue: the music was simply seen as part of a long tradition, much like heavy-metal bands wearing make-up, or performers now needing to have blue hair and pretend not to be the straight males that would be too boring in these jaded times.
I would say that the principle involved was that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but in fact the blackface trope was so far removed from imitation in the B&W Minstrel Show that most viewers were entirely colour-blind.
To what extent black immigrants of the 1960s were offended by it only they can say, but as has been said, far less than 1% of the population was black – to naive (and native) British audiences “foreign” meant “exotic,” so The Old Bazaar in Cairo, Nagasaki, Roll Along Covered Wagon, Mammy Bong or Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport were all equally, and innocently, stereotypic. Stereotypic Brits in US TV shows were at worst mildly annoying – if we’d seen the British depicted in Communist Chinese plays who knows if we’d have been more upset?
Before my time but crikey, I can see how that would be deemed really bad by today’s standards. But I just see it as a reflection of the times back then. There was but a fraction of the immigration in the UK then, not many people travelled overseas for their hols ( or even had a passport presumably? ) and so many people probably went most their lives never speaking to anyone who wasn’t also white. Another example of progress from that era is the abolition nowadays of corporal punishment ( a.k.a child abuse ) in schools and the banning ( or frowning upon, at least ) of smacking your kid. Instead ‘progress’ entails that we brainwash them into believing they were born in the wrong body, start them on puberty blockers in primary school then cut off their breasts or penis when they’re teenagers and call it ”gender affirming care”. Imagine if those people back in the ’50s had had a crystal ball to see what wonders the future held for their kids/grandkids? But at least we stopped child abuse ( a.k.a smacking ).
There has also long been a history of blackface within the Morris dance & Mummers players which go back to the Middle Ages in the UK so culturally wouldn’t have hit a nerve with the population who had never encountered a black individual.
I thought they were as creepy as clowns.
But if Justin Trudeau had no problems…………..
Yes, I always found them creepy too – my mother loved the show, heaven knows why.
It also brings to mind a book that must have been in most children’s bookcases in the 50s and 60s, ‘Little Black Sambo’. I bet hardly a copy remains now.
When people say “by today’s standards” they forget that today’s standards are really low
Jeez, I hope the warped attitudes of our new zeitgeist (well, dating from 2020…) will have changed in 20 years – preferably long before then.
As for TBAWMS, I remember it being on the telly but didn’t like it because to my childish eyes they looked grotesque; nothing like real black people. The music wasn’t my thing either, but it didn’t seem quite as bad as Sing Something Simple: Sunday teatime misery-hour for someone with no say over what was on the TV or radio.
*Shudder*
Another good article by Guy showing that modern times can be contrasted with times past.
One of my personal bugbears at present is Grayson Perry in “womanface”, ditto drag shows on BBC. Why do they consider Rue Paul “family entertainment”? What about Danny La Rue? I wonder if his shows could be re-shown on BBC?
We seem to have gone from white men parodying black men in the Minstrel Show …. to black men and women parodying upper class English and American people in various “historical” costume dramas on the BBC, ITV and Netflix.
Oh, and black actors assuming the historical roles of white people – not least the recent depiction on C5 of Anne Boleyn by a black actress and on Netflix, Cleopatra who was Greek.
I remember the B & W Minstrel Show in the ’60s – I was a child and didn’t enjoy it. I do now think it was insensitive and inappropriate, but was too young to have a view at the time.
I find the deliberate depiction of white characters from history by black actors to be insulting and offensive. So I won’t watch any programme which includes them.
The depiction of White historical characters isn’t offensive per se (not to me), it’s absurd.
But what is offensive is the reason to do it. It’s an ‘up yours Whitie’ and it is insulting my intelligence by imagining I won’t or shouldn’t see the absurdity and that I cannot see it is manipulating society promoting a Black Master Race before which we Whities must bend a knee and know our place and have our noses rubbed in it.
However. If a Shakespeare play were to be performed in Africa, or India with local actors playing the parts, it wouldn’t be absurd as it’s not pretence, intending insult or being manipulative. In fact it’s a compliment that English literature is appreciated.
As ever, context and intent matters.
I am off to see Macbeth at the RSC tonight. I understand the actor in the title role is black. I guess he won’t be “whited up”, which I would prefer as I have no problem with cultural appropriation. Imagine the row now if a white actor pretended to be Othello.
I trust the BBC will pay substantial reparations to the black musicians that could have taken part in the show.