That Enemy

According to David Baddiel, J. Robert Oppenheimer should have been played by a Jew. The derision has been as predictable as it has been correct. Last week, David Harewood's otherwise excellent documentary on blackface ended with the fading away, since it was never cancelled, of The Black and White Minstrel Show. But Little Britain started on television seven years after the end of Fantasy Football League. Baddiel had single-handedly brought back blackface, which had not been seen on British television in a good 10 years.

Until then, blackface had not been acceptable in the 1990s, even among the white people by whom I was almost entirely surrounded while growing up. Or if it was, then it must have been a class thing. Certainly, the reaction of Fantasy Football League's studio audience to Baddiel's first impersonation of Jason Lee included an audible element of heavy shock. If blacking up was mainstream entertainment, then who else was doing it? Baddiel gave it an extra decade of life.

Baddiel has been in two comedy partnerships, and in both cases the other bloke has been the funny one. For many years, he hardly appeared except as a guest on one of Frank Skinner's shows. In his late fifties, he wants to reinvent himself as a public intellectual by taking up a cause that placed him beyond criticism. He has therefore had to go through the motions of apologising in person to Lee. Even then, though, he still managed to present himself as somehow the victim.

But the world moves on, and even Baddiel's old mates from football are having none of it. So now he accuses them of "trolling" him due to "white guilt". He calls them, "That enemy. They're white, heterosexual men, desperately trying to show solidarity, as they see it, with black people." He knows that it is over. We are within sight of getting rid of this public nuisance once and for all.