 Curry and Chips
1 9 6 9 (UK)
6 x 30 minute episodes
 Set
in the staff canteen and on the factory floor at Lillicrap Ltd,
makers of seaside novelties, Curry & Chips was a Johnny
Speight comedy about Kevin O'Grady - a bizarrely named Pakistani
immigrant (a blacked-up Spike Milligan) being
"civilized" by working class Brits, led by the
liberal-minded but somewhat confused factory foreman, Arthur (Eric
Sykes).
Sam Kydd featured as the malodorous Smellie, with Norman
Rossington and Geoffrey Hughes as racist white Liverpudlians, and
singer/actor Kenny Lynch as a black anti-Pakistani.
In addition to the liberal slinging about of racist terms there
was a good deal of (mostly harmless) swearing, one viewer noting
that the word "bloody" was said 59 times in a single
episode. (Only Eric Sykes didn't swear in the show - he simply
refused to do so).
Produced and Directed by Keith Beckett, this sitcom was very
much a product of the 60s. It tried (not always successfully) to
deal with racism, bigotry and class hatred in a light-hearted
manner, and this series would not (could not) have been made
today.
 Political
correctness ensured that two similar series - The Melting Pot,
also starring Milligan as a Pakistani (six episodes of which were
made in 1975), and Jewel In The Crown, for which a pilot
was shot in 1985 - were scrapped.
One episode of The Melting Pot was shown in June 1975,
but the BBC refused to show the subsequent five episodes as the
ingredients constituted way too much of a heady brew for the Beeb
to handle.
Ironically Curry & Chips was LWT's first sitcom made
in colour . . .
|
