RIGHT, so we’ve pulled down a statue and we’ve pulled Little Britain from Netflix and Britbox so maybe now we could stop a second and have a think about where we’re going with this. The decision to drop Little Britain is understandable – in fact, I’m surprised it’s taken this long – but we should also be careful about what we condemn.

The issue many people have with Little Britain, and its sequel Come Fly With Me, is the fact that its stars, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, would sometimes put on make-up to portray people of other races. Lucas’s defence is that the conceit of the show was that he and Walliams played as many characters as possible – fat, thin, straight, gay, male, female – and that playing different races was simply part of that.

In his memoirs Little Me, Lucas also argues that what he and Walliams were doing in Little Britain was different to what white comedians did in the 1960s and 70s. In that era, according to Lucas, the comedians thought the very act of playing someone black was funny in itself, whereas he and Walliams wanted to reflect the multi-cultures of Britain.

The distinction Lucas makes is important and you can see it in other comedies. Are You Being Served?, for instance, famously had a gay character played by a gay man, but in the 70s the audience was being asked to laugh at the fact the character was gay. Forty years later, we still have gay characters – including the “only gay in the village” in Little Britain – but we’re no longer laughing at the fact he’s gay, we’re laughing at the fact he’s pretentious or insecure or snobbish or whatever. And no one has the right not to be mocked for the way they behave.

The problem with Little Britain is that it sometimes fails this test and fails it badly. The character of the Thai bride Ting-Tong for example – which Lucas himself regrets – was one crude joke based on the fact she was foreign and spoke in a foreign accent. Many of the other sketches had the same problem. We weren’t laughing at what fat people or trans people sometimes do and say, we were being invited to laugh at the fact they were fat or trans. It’s a subtle but important difference.

It also explains why so many people have now grown to dislike Little Britain and are glad to see the back of it – it mocked minorities for being minorities – and it’s understandable that a company like Netflix, with its young and diverse audience, wants programmes that are the right fit for it. White actors wearing black-up is also crude and old-fashioned and, whatever Matt Lucas says, veers too close to mocking people for who they are and what they look like rather than what they do.

However, there are a few problems with the approach Netflix and others have taken. For a start, there’s no consistency – Britbox has dropped Little Britain but still shows a 1970s episode of Doctor Who that features a white actor made up to look Chinese. What they’ve done in that case is they’ve attached a warning to the episode which looks like a much more mature approach.

We should also be wary that a prescriptive attitude to actors playing people who are different from them doesn’t get out of hand. I like the idea, for example, that a straight actor can play a gay person (and vice versa) and bring their own take to it – after all, the best view of a subject is sometimes from the outside. Will people also start calling for other programmes to be taken down from Netflix for similar reasons? Fawlty Towers, for example, because Andrew Sachs isn’t Spanish? Or Monty Python because they aren’t real ladies?

And perhaps it would be useful here to think about the longer-term future as well. Here we are in 2020 condemning, quite rightly, some of the men and women of the past for the way they behaved and asking whether we should still have statues to them. We’re also becoming more sensitive and thoughtful about the things we used to laugh at.

But what will people think when they look back at us in the same way? Yes, we find the attitudes of the 19th century shocking, but will the men and women of the future be just as shocked by some of our attitudes in the 21st? Will they recoil at the fact some of us ate animals, or refused to accept trans women are women, or thought it was acceptable to get in a plane for a fortnight’s holiday in Spain? All I’m saying is: condemn the past all you like, but be prepared to be condemned by the future.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald