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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 199021" data-attributes="member: 23">Fawlty Towers has been a very pleasant surprise for me.  I was expecting to happily while away a number of evenings with a few chortles at a fairly familiar old series.I'm not a big laugher. I used to be, but seem to have grown into one of these terribly British "laughing on the inside" undemonstrative kind of people. And so it's taken me aback to find that Fawlty Towers has given me the works. Right down to tears streaming down my face.The two biggest culprits have been The Hotel Inspectors and Gourmet Night in which each scene - each line, in fact - has been a gem.The political incorrectness is exhilarating. The casual physical abuse is a case in point. And the equal opportunity disparagement. Be it gender, race, sexuality, ability or height. Nobody is left out. My favourite scenes of the entire series so far were those in Gourmet Night, in which Basil repeatedly put his foot in it regarding the diminutive Mrs Hall:[MEDIA=youtube]k9-vdMjdZXw[/MEDIA]And then had to introduce Colonel Hall - who had an involuntary twitch - to a couple named "Twitchen" while trying to avoid using their actual name:[MEDIA=youtube]5Q_bTCX8sPk[/MEDIA]Allan Cuthbertson is the perfect straight man. Authoritative, uptight and completely humourless. He seems offended about something when he arrives and feels like he's persistently about to explode. Which adds to the delightful awkwardness. It creates Basil's own personal purgatory within his own territory. Joan Sanderson's hard of hearing battleaxe in the first episode of Series Two serves much the same purpose. None of us would want to be on the wrong side of these characters so we feel empathy for his situation while enjoying the schadenfreude that comes of seeing him dig a huge hole for himself.And then there's the whole of The Germans. From Major Gowen's loud and casual categorisation of racial epithets to the whole association of Germans with Naziism to Basil's goose-step. It revels in its insular, fusty, stiff upper lipped backwardness. It encapsulates everything that's wrong with attitudes of the time. And it's ugly. But that's the entire point.It saddens me slightly to learn that Major Gowen's racist slurs were removed from a 2013 re-run of the series on BBC. Not just because it messes with a form of art (which it does), but also because this form of censorship rewrites history somewhat. Yes - the script is of its time. It's dated. And the language is not acceptable in 21st Century Britain.But, think about it. That language wasn't really acceptable in 1975. It just wasn't hidden from view. The whole point of it is that Gowen is an antiquated Blimp. His loud casual racism in the foyer is uncomfortable because it's unacceptable. That's why it's important. Nothing about the scene says that racism is acceptable. Quite the opposite. It reinforces just how ugly it is.I just can't get on board with the attitude that removing ugliness from sight is helpful. Making something invisible risks empowering the thing you're trying to hide. It means people might look back at an idealised, airbrushed past and wonder what the big deal was. It risks creating a culture where people who didn't experience such a time know next to nothing about past attitudes or atrocities and care even less. I find <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duFwkuETFhU" target="_blank">Freddie Bentley's</a> attitude towards World War II far more concerning and offensive than I do Basil Fawlty or Major Gowen's.Another damaging element of this censorship is the hierarchy it creates. Who decides that slurs against West Indian people are more offensive than epithets used to describe Spanish people. I find them both offensive and would have something to say if I encountered someone using them in the way that these characters do. But I don't agree that any of them should be removed from a programme which has the context of the era in which it was made and the characters who are using it and and the situation in which it is used. The 1975 audience laughed at the idiocy and foolishness of the person using it. And the same is true 45 years later. So what's the problem?I'm grateful that the DVDs are uncensored and give the audience credit for being able to understand the context and make up their own minds about it. We know it's not big. We know it's not clever. But we also know it exists. And that's truly empowering.</blockquote>

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