For café owner René and wife Edith played by the late Gordon Kaye and Carmen Silvera (Image: Allstar/BBC)
When I heard a plaque was to be unveiled in commemoration of the BBC's wartime sitcom 'Allo 'Allo! the only appropriate response was to stand up and cheer. It's so rare these days to hear anything positive about any British comedy series that had millions of viewers glued to their TV sets during the Seventies and Eighties. They have become the victims of the forces of political correctness that dominate so many sectors of society these days - faintly embarrassing to TV bosses. Yet later this year the British Comedy Society will unveil a blue plaque at Lynford Hall, near Thetford, Norfolk, where the iconic exterior shots of Café René were filmed.
While this bestows on 'Allo 'Allo! a degree of rehabilitation - despite its unfashionable double entendres, silly accents and national and gender stereotyping - I fear few other TV classics can expect similar treatment.
In the current climate, many have been placed on the "best forgotten" shelf. Broadcasters would never dream of repeating comic masterpieces such as Till Death Us Do Part, Rising Damp or It Ain't Half Hot Mum.
The resulting outcry about perceived racism and sexism would be too great. But that is to mistake their aims and objectives. Many of these shows were conceived, in part at least, to challenge and ridicule these very prejudices.
Take Till Death Us Do Part, written by the great Johnny Speight. Its central character was a superb creation called Alf Garnett, a white working-class man who was a bigot, a misogynist and a racist. He railed against socialists, foreigners and "Scouse gits" and stood for the Queen, Empire and West Ham United.
He was a great, fierce comedy phenomenon but you wouldn't be able to show him now because of changing social attitudes; the trolls are waiting. By the time he had uttered one line, they'd be sparking a social media storm of the sort broadcasters dread.
Warren Mitchell, the actor who played Alf, was a friend of mine and he was Jewish. He told Johnny Speight that in addition to Alf's other faults he should be anti-Semitic.
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, starred Windsor Davies (Image: Edward Wing / Rex Features)
So Johnny wrote an episode in which Alf discovered his uncle Arnie Diamond was Jewish, which meant he had Jewish blood.
Outraged, he ranted and raved then, when he finally stopped, Dandy Nichols, who played his wife Else, asked: "Well do you want this bacon sandwich or not?" Warren said some of the resulting fan mail was quite horrifying. People would tell him: "It needed saying,Alf" and he'd reply: "No, we're taking the **** out of you, you've missed the whole point."
But the fact that a minority of viewers got the wrong end of the stick is no reason to ban it for ever.
ITV's attempt to do something similar was called Love Thy Neighbour, about a workingclass white couple with black neighbours. But its portrayal of the main black character Bill, played by Rudolph Walker, was patronising. It was a step in the right direction but it was still a stereotypical portrayal.
The sitcom I particularly admired when it came to the race issue was Rising Damp, written by Eric Chappell, with Leonard Rossiter as the miserly and self-regarding landlord Rupert Rigsby. He didn't express his views loudly or clearly
