"But the 1970s sitcom is also a repository of our nightmares. [Love Thy Neighbour, another sitcom with obsolete attitudes to race, and Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech viewed as "shorthand for British racism"] It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Jimmy Perry and David Croft's comedy about a British Army concert party in India between V-E Day and V-J Day, fulfils a similar function. We remember the white actor Michael Bates in brownface, shrieking and nodding under a turban, and Windsor Davies’s sergeant major bemoaning his command of "a load of poofs" – and we know we're seeing something that a modern audience would find hard to distinguish from The Black and White Minstrel Show."
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Matthew Sweet "From TV's crown jewels to racist nightmares: can the 1970s sitcom be saved?" The Telegraph (14 August 2021)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/It_Ain't_Half_Hot_Mum
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It Ain't Half Hot Mum
It Ain't Half Hot Mum is a British sitcom about the adventures of a Royal Artillery Concert Party, broadcast on the BBC between 1974 and 1981, and written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft. It was set in British India and Burma, during the last months of the Second World War in 1945.
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