My observations suggest Britain is a less racist country than it used to be. Though I’m open to contradiction on this point.
I’m a white man living out in the sticks in a predominantly white village, so I quite accept I could be missing something. But it was the sad death of Prunella Scales, best remembered as the inimitable Sybil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers, that got me thinking.
There is a 1975 scene in which Basil Fawlty recoils at the black doctor treating Sybil for an ingrown toenail. It is very funny. It is also very racist, though no one seemed to mind back then. Yet no TV producer would allow such a thing today.
Times have certainly changed. The pub near my school had a sign in the window: “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs.” Even when I was old enough to drink, I never went there. Jokes which began “an Englishman, an Irishman and a Jew...” are no longer told, thank goodness.
My parents watched Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, and although it was a satire ridiculing racism and bigotry, you would never hear such language on TV today.
Even the punchy, vitriolic tweets I get on my social media rarely have so much as a whiff of racism about them. So when Reform MP Sarah Pochin makes a remark which, in her leader Nigel Farage’s words, were “ugly and unpleasant”, it kicks up more of a stink than it might have done years ago.
Sarah Pochin isn't a racist - but she has some serious questions to ask herself - Nigel Nelson
|Getty Images
Sarah told a TV interviewer: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.” One careless remark doesn’t make Sarah a racist, but it was a racist remark.
She later apologised and added: “Representation should reflect the diversity of modern Britain, but it should also be proportionate and inclusive of everyone.”
The MP should now be asking herself what it is exactly she finds maddening about black and Asian actors. And why does their inclusion need to be proportionate to their presence in the population? Bomb disposal drama Trigger Point has just begun a new run on ITV.
The black and Asian actors in the cast are entirely appropriate, given that the setting is present-day London. But I have heard grumbles when they turn up in historical dramas, such as the BBC’s second series of Wolf Hall.
The complaint is that there were no black people around in Tudor times. Wrong. There were. Obviously, Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis’s Henry VIII (who reminds me so much of my old boss Robert Maxwell, it sends a shiver down my spine) have to be white.
But not so the supporting cast. Take the turban-wearing African trumpeter who gets a bit part. The real one, John Blanke, arrived at Henry’s court in 1501, in the entourage of the king’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
And he became so matey with Henry he was confident enough to ask for a pay raise and got it - from 8d to 16d a day. We know about John because he appears in contemporary paintings. But there could be unrecorded others like him.
In 1584, Walter Raleigh brought two Native American elders from the New World to Queen Elizabeth’s court, where they were also welcomed.
Later arrivals thrilled London crowds by paddling their canoes up the Thames. What irked the populace in those days was not small boats but European free movement, which brought 64,000 migrants here, from Flemish weavers in Norwich to Italian bankers in London’s Lombard Street.
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