the black & white minstrel show

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Thorne raised the issue again in 1967 with Oliver Whitley, Chief Assistant to the BBC's director general, Sir Hugh Greene. He continued: "If black faces are to be shown, for heaven’s sake let coloured artists be employed and with dignity". This failure to even see any racism was a measure of the BBC’s real problem: the archival record of its behind-the-scenes thinking during this period is far from flattering.

The BBC says that the Black and White Minstrels is "a traditional show enjoyed by millions for what it offers in good-hearted family entertainment". What’s harder to fathom is why, in an era in which tens of thousands of black people had long been settled in Britain or were trying to make it their home, a BBC which had already managed to reflect something of the reality of black British life in documentaries such as 1955’s Has Britain a Colour Bar?

Prior to the creation of the television show in 1957, the BBC Television Toppers had performed on air since February 1953. vague] The show continued for three years, [ citation needed] and the Australian and New Zealand box office records it set have never been broken. Records that aren't in picture sleeves will either be in a company sleeve or a generic plain sleeve.

The CD remaster is pretty much the same quality as older vinyl anyway and has a fair amount of surface noise from the original vinyl, so you may as well just enjoy the original vinyl with pops and crackles and all - on a record like this it just adds to the charm. The BBC might also ask the three American networks, since it is only a theatrical show, what reaction they think the series would have on responsible coloured opinion in the United States if they put it out coast to coast. It’s all very well people who are not black saying ‘I didn’t think about it that way’”, he told them, “it’s the people who are black” whose views surely needed to be taken into account.

Adam’s reply came back accusing Thorne of “arrant nonsense”: the show, Adam argued, belonged to that “perfectly honourable theatrical tradition of the British music hall”. The presence of black performers on the Black and White Minstrel Show was less a measure of progress than a sign of just how restricted the opportunities were for regular employment. and dramas such as 1956’s A Man from the Sun, took so little account of the offence caused by white performers blacking-up their faces on a peak-time TV show. Stephen Murphy, Senior Programme Officer at the BBC’s competitor, ITV, also privately wrote to Lamb expressing his support, ‘blacking up is a theatrical convention so old that is has lost any derogatory meaning,’ and noting that CARD’s only contribution was ‘to create a racial issue where none exists’. One way of testing responsible opinion would be for the BBC to send the Black and White Minstrels book and the coloured Radio Times front cover of them to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, and ask for their opinion.