Reasons to be Cheerful: Goodness Gracious Me

Go back to where you came from. But I come from here. No. Where are you really from? Identity, hey?

‘Tis indeed vexatious, is it not? This question of identity: who we are and where we belong. Which for some of us will always have a supplementary appendix question: Yes, but where are you from originally? In my case, my answers to those questions almost always go like this: I’m British; I belong wherever I find myself; I’m originally from Harpurhey, a working class suburb just north of Manchester city centre, for it is there that I was born. And sometimes that suffices, but very often it doesn’t. Which leads to appendix question No 2: Ah! But where are your parents from? And, yes, you guessed it, that leads to yet more questions when I reply my mother was also born in Harpurhey, but my father was born in Jhansi, India, at the fag end of the British Raj. So, I wasn’t kidding; ‘tis indeed vexatious, is it not?

And what better time than now, in this age of racist rioting in the UK and a fearful new world order about to restart in the USA; a land, which, it bears repeating, is almost exclusively filled with people who originally came from somewhere else, to be reminded that we, as human beings, have more in common than we have in differences?

Especially when it comes to humour, and though online videos of lager louts being hit in the nuts by a brick thrown, most probably, by their equally IQ-challenged brother, might feed our need to sometimes laugh at others, what really allows us to see ourselves as we really are is when we laugh at ourselves. No matter where we come from; whether that be Jhansi or Harpurhey.

And though Nigel and Tiny Tommy would probably say this is an example of ‘people comin’ over ‘ere and takin’ are jokes, an’ ‘avin’ a larf at us’, I would remind them that all of the actors in this sketch are…wait for it…British! Ta-da! Never, ever, ever shall be slaves and all that stuff, hey? Dare I say sons and daughters of Albion, as the flag flyers of the St George’s cross would have it?

For two of the four main actors were born here, while the other two are children of the revolution…no, not Marc’s, but the revolution in British modern life that came after the crumbling of Empire.

So, could it be more ‘British’ ? No. I don’t think it could. And I’m struggling to think of anything funnier than this when it comes to holding up a mirror for us to take a good look at what we look like today. Certainly not some of the laughably but desperately unfunny ‘comedy’ that came before it that also purported to reflect our society.

Not Bernard Manning. Nor the sadly delusional Jim (Racist? Me?) Davidson, or the handful of non-white stooges who either had to play out racist tropes to get on, such as Charlie Williams, or those who were, to give them the benefit of the doubt, young and stupid, like Lenny Henry. Henry, of course, had his Damascene Conversion, and, thankfully, stopped playing the dope to the white massa a long time ago. Rumours of him becoming funny, though, remain unfounded…

And for those of us who were on the wrong end of the pointy stick of ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ or ‘Mind Your Language’ in the 1970s, ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ is like a surreal dream that was simply unimaginable back then. But more than all of that, all of its transformative and healing power, all of its great goodness, is its sheer, unalloyed and brilliant joy. It is funny. Very funny. And because it makes us laugh, it helps us heal. For who but the most unbridled and unapologetic racist could fail to laugh at ‘Indians ordering food in an English after a skinful of lassi’. As opposed to what we laughed at in the 1970s.

When ‘P@ki’, ‘W@g’, S*mbo, and the ‘N-word’ were used everyday in the street and most evenings on the box. When we were laughed at, and so excluded from the society we ostensibly lived in. The one we helped build. The one we made better. The one we enriched beyond anyone’s imagination or ambition. And certainly not within the limited and blinkered, and tragically sad, scope of the lives of those who ‘wanted their country back’ as they set fire to hotels housing refugees.

Well, Nige and Tiny Tom, this IS what your country looks like, so you’d best get used to it…or sod off to your imaginary island of warm beer and wife-beater, serial Burberry abuses, bookies on every street corner, and St George’s flags hanging dismally from every bedroom window.

This is Britain now. And we are an infinitely better nation for it. Which doesn’t mean we’re perfect, as last summer’s riots so determinedly proved, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction. And sharing and crying and laughing at the same things. Together. As one.

Goodness gracious me…and loving our neighbours now!