‘It was always dreadful’: Twitter reactions to Little Britain being back on the BBC

Little Britain has returned to our screens after being dropped from platforms back in June 2020. The show has returned after having scenes edited, cut out and an advisory warning being added at the start of the episodes. But surprise surprise, despite some scenes being edited out, a lot of racist and bigoted sketches have been left in.

A spokesperson from the BBC has defended the decision to make the sketch show available again. They said: “Little Britain has been made available to fans on BBC iPlayer following edits made to the series by Matt and David that better reflect the changes in the cultural landscape over the last 20 years since the show was first made.” Apparently half hour episodes have been cut to around 23 minutes and there will be a warning message before episodes which tells viewers there could be “discriminatory language”.

However many people on Twitter believe the cuts have not gone far enough and think Little Britain shouldn’t even be back on BBC iPlayer. One person wrote: “So Matt Lucas and David Walliams have cut the blackface from Little Britain to ‘reflect changes in culture landscape’ yet this has stayed in.” The tweet then includes screenshots from an episode showing a character played by David Walliams describing an Asian man as having a “slight smell of soy sauce” and “the ching-chong China man”.

Another person wrote: “Little Britain was always dreadful and should be locked away for the rest of time.” Someone else admitted they used to find Little Britain funny when they were younger, however now they have grown up and realised it’s “abhorred”. They continued: “I’m not a dumb kid anymore. I don’t know why people in their 50s are pretending to be.”

However there are also people in favour of having the show back on iPlayer. One person tweeted: “Personally I don’t think Little Britain should be edited. It was one of the most popular shows on the nation’s biggest television station. People need to be reminded of what they found funny in the 00s. And stop pretended that we were some sort of tolerant, accepting, nation.”

via Twitter

Someone else who was against the editing of Little Britain shared their thoughts, they said: “Little Britain is a comedy. Stop being such fucking snowflakes. Little Britain was the most popular comedy show on TV when it debuted and you all laughed at it but now you want to play justice warriors. Grow the fuck up.” Of course, how did we forget that if we label something so offensive as a comedy then it’s no longer okay to be offended.

However the majority of responses to the return of Little Britain have been saying something along the lines of this person’s tweet. It says: “Was kind of hoping I had hallucinated that Little Britain is back. Two middle class white men punching down everyone with their racism, misogyny, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, classism isn’t really funny, or innovative. Absolutely vile.”

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