The memory-holing of Mitchell and Webb tells us the BBC are the baddies

‘Are we the baddies?’

In the legendary sketch from the BBC comedy, That Mitchell and Webb Look, a Nazi Waffen-SS officer poses this question to his colleague, after noticing the fearsome skull icons on their uniforms. After the BBC’s latest bout of Orwellian censorship, perhaps this is a question the Beeb ought to ask itself.

To mark the 20th anniversary of David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s classic sketch show, the BBC has restored all four series to the iPlayer, but 11 of the classic sketches have been censored. These include sketches in which a burqa-wearing Muslim is invited on to a makeover show, an indigenous tribe is discovered in a garden centre, and a civil-war re-enactment society gets bored of playing Roundheads and Cavaliers and decides to re-enact a conflict in Congo instead.

While these sketches play on what might loosely be described as racial themes, anyone mildly observant will quickly recognise the real targets are racism, racial stereotypes and the liberal middle classes’ awkwardness around race. In the civil-war sketch, an awkward-looking Webb, dressed in blackface as a Sudanese tribesman, continually breaks character to ask: ‘Are we sure this isn’t racist?’ The burqa sketch quickly transitions to Mitchell and Webb playing themselves, with Webb asking Mitchell if they’ve taken things too far. ‘Aren’t we just taking the piss out of people’s sincerely held beliefs?’, he says.

Only the most literal-minded, humourless scold could possibly conclude that these sketches are racist. Yet it seems that this is precisely the kind of person who works in the BBC’s comedy department these days. As a Beeb spokesperson, justifying the censorship of these sketches, put it to The Times: ‘This is a 20-year-old sketch show. We have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t.’

Which brings us back to the question of who are ‘the baddies’ in this scenario. The BBC has a statue of George Orwell outside New Broadcasting House, its London HQ. Yet it seems none of the Beeb’s higher-ups has digested the message of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps the BBC suits really believe Big Brother and the Party are the good guys. Perhaps they think the memory-holing of old news articles to reflect the Party’s views in the present is actually a jolly good thing to do, keeping ‘the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t’.

After all, the censorship of That Mitchell and Webb Look is hardly an isolated incident. During the Black Lives Matter ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020 (which our supposedly impartial state broadcaster enthusiastically supported and participated in), BBC iPlayer was quick to slap trigger warnings on 2000s comedies including The League of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh. Other comedy classics, like Little Britain and Come Fly With Me, were removed in their entirety for their sins against woke. Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s most grotesque characters were also clearly intended to send up, not to big up, racism and prejudice. But such was the BBC’s zeal for censorship, they were removed regardless.

As Orwell reminds us, those who control the past control the future. It is bad enough that the BBC’s scrubbing of ‘problematic’ content from its iPlayer archives will deprive us of beloved comedy from a bygone age. Yet the message it sends to the comedy writers of today and the near future is arguably even more chilling. A new comedy show that dared to touch the forbidden subject of race would surely have no chance of getting past the BBC censors / commissioners. Yet more dispiriting, unfunny, regime-approved comedy is now all that awaits.