Little Britain started on television seven years after the end of Fantasy Football League. The piggybacking mediocrity David Baddiel had single-handedly brought back blackface, which by the middle of the 1990s had not been seen on British television in a good 10 years.
Baddiel gave blackface an extra decade of life, although that did not include Papa Lazarou, which was an example of an actor playing a blackface performer as Brian Conley had played Al Jolson, but which was not in itself the blackface performance of Baddiel's Jason Lee or of David Walliams's Desiree DeVere.
That is the background to Baddiel's self-appointment, in his late fifties, as a national and even international intellectual guiding light and moral arbiter, clearly positioning himself as the successor to Stephen Fry, former game show host, and author of The Liar and The Hippopotamus. Ceding to these grifters the authority that they imagined for themselves would enthrone blacking up and the favourable depiction of pederasty. Resist.
You would puncture Baddiel's or Fry's smugness in one interview.
ReplyDeleteThat is why it would never happen.
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