"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."