Like the old times

With the return of the 70s British sitcom ‘Mind Your Language’ on Indian television, Akhil Kadidal analyses the reason for its success, and its indelible charm that still tickles the funny bone .

With the return of the classic British sitcom, Mind Your Language, to Indian televisions, we are once again faced with the sheer resilience exhibited by that strange, often bewildering genre known as British comedy.

Built around the bulwark of a select few shows and films, their dated, albeit iconic images betraying them as a product of the golden age of English humour, the 70s and 80s, British comedy remains one of England’s most prolific exports. The genre — and its peculiarities indeed qualify it as a genre — was meant for British audiences, even if few media executives foresaw their mass overseas appeal. But while this global popularity is a result of the great love for situational comedies, the essence behind the comedy has more serious roots.

Sitcom alert

For non-Britons, the thrill of British comedy is its singular promise of showing the stiff, starch-collared English lose their reserve. After all, England may be the land of the monarchy, London, fly-fishing, and refined warm beer, but there is nothing quite like the sight of an Englishman, an ex-empire-builder, deprived of his composure. As George Orwell once reflected in his unhappy time as a colonial policeman in Burma, “Every white (Briton’s life in front of foreigners) was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”

We can do nothing if not laugh at the appallingly rude Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers or the inane behaviour of the faculty and students in Mind Your Language. But in these skits lie a subtle social commentary, which reveals kernels of self-truths for an English audience. If the French Resistance of ‘Allo ‘Allo! is portrayed as an oversexed, underequipped band of misfits, it mirrors real British perceptions of French military efforts during the war. And if the pompous self-importance displayed by Ms Betty Slocombe or Captain Peacock in Are you being Served? was indicative of the realities of the class system, then what better way than to pound it mercilessly using satire?
British style

Comedy for the British, in the middling period between 1960 and 1989, increasingly became a means for introspection even as Britain withdrew from her empire, even as the nation lost its prestige as an international power and even as the British people began to question the idea of “Britishness.” In Mind Your Language, created by Britain’s LWT network in late-1977, satire is used to examine the especially contentious issue of immigration and the frightening rise of xenophobia. When Jeremy Brown (Barry Evens), a temporary instructor, is hired to teach English as a foreign language to night school students, he is warned that the previous teacher had gone insane trying to do so.

Although Brown brushes off the warning, he soon discovers that to bring his students into line with British standards requires more than skill alone. A primary hurdle is students’ creative interpretations of the English language. What unfolds is a genuinely funny comedy which produces as many laughs as it does questions about the then ease of assimilating immigrants into British society.

To be fair, however, nearly all of the characters are stereotypes. There is Ali Nadim (Dino Shafeek), the affable but dense Muhajir with his trademark Jinnah cap; Ranjeeth Singh (played by the Ceylonese actor Albert Moses), an extreme parody of an Indian Sikh, the sexually attractive French au-pair Danielle, the extremely formal Japanese Taro, the seedy Italian Giovanni and others. Mind Your Language may be an extreme exercise in stereotypes, but it also shows its characters as being essentially human at their core, just like anyone else. It is perhaps little surprise that the show is especially popular in countries where its characters come from.

But the stereotyping ultimately led to the show’s demise — LWT’s deputy controller of entertainment, Michael Grade, was appalled by it. Nevertheless, Mind Your Language has spawned imitations in the United States, Nigeria, Kenya, India and Sri Lanka, and remains popular in much of East Africa and Asia. But the big question remains. Why do dated shows such as Mind Your Language have such resilience? The answer again perhaps lies in history.

The British writer Jeremy Paxman argues that when the end of empire happened and when the British worldview was turned upside down, the easiest British response was to laugh at it. Humour became a means for Britain to make sense of herself. In this context, shows like Mind Your Language are timeless because they offer us the glimpse of a Britain struggling to find her diminished self-identity in a post-imperial world. We, the audience see this, even if we do not recognise it at first.

English comedy can always be a foil to British stoicism, but it also remains a measure of how a nation used humour to reclaim her bearings. Mind Your Language is now airing on Comedy Central, every Saturday and Sunday, at 1 pm.