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Curry and Chips

RUMPUS-ROUSING MILLIGANISM with Spike as (sigh) blacked-up worker Paki-Paddy, ERIC SYKES as woolly liberal foreman, KENNY LYNCH as anti-Asian racist and NORMAN ROSSINGTON as a white bigot. Fun for all the family!

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    April 30, 2010 at 5:50 pm

    Having just watched all six episodes on DVD, I can honestly say this was Milligan and Sykes’s darkest hour. Tiresome, unfunny, misguided, poorly scripted and blighted by the LWT trademark of screeching audience laughter even when nothing remotely amusing has happened. And Kenny Lynch phoning in a lazy performance between golf tournaments.

  2. Mick B

    September 16, 2019 at 4:28 am

    Written by Alf Garnett supremo Johnny Speight, a huge amount of the humour was actually pretty sharp. But darkface aside – though Milligan was very good at his cartoon character, looking through a 1960s prism – its actual failing was Speight’s disgust came through as pretty much any ordinary white character showed hostile racism to anyone different. This made the show grating in places and way too many characters are disagreeable… and perhaps the show’s an attack on the same ordinary viewers laughing at the brownface. Pity, as the huge strides in race relations in just 50 years shows there’s been a positive side to the white people after all…..

  3. Richardpd

    August 10, 2021 at 11:24 pm

    The Melting Pot was another Spike Milligan vehicle dealing with race relations which was pulled by the BBC after a pilot & and one episode out of six.

  4. Tom Ronson

    March 25, 2022 at 4:08 pm

    As much as I love Spike Milligan – and Eric Sykes too, though my admiration for him was somewhat tarnished by the revelation that he was a fan of the dreadful Ayn Rand – even comedy Gods have feet of clay, and in this case, said feet were sculpted by a four-year-old who wasn’t allowed anywhere near a kiln, thus rendering them unfit for purpose. The Melting Pot was similarly misguided, as was his awful 1980s novel The Looney – both examples of the solipsistic extremes to which a lauded talent can go when they’re absolutely assured of their righteous intentions. It reminds me of the dog-eared excuse trotted out by old-school club comics whenever they were challenged about their unsavoury material – ‘I’ve got loads of black / Irish / Pakistani / gay mates, and they can all see the funny side.’

  5. Glenn Aylett

    March 25, 2022 at 9:11 pm

    @ Tom Ronson, Eric Sykes seems to be an almost forgotten comedy star, and while crud like Curry And Chips deserves to be disowned, his self titled BBC1 sitcom with Hattie Jacques as his live in sister had some excellent episodes. The one where Peter Sellers plays an escaped convict is probably the best and as good as the better remembered Steptoe and Son episode with the two escaped prisoners.

  6. Richardpd

    March 25, 2022 at 10:44 pm

    Spike Milligan had a very multifaceted personality, brilliant & quirky at his best, but also angry on certain issued & pushing the boundaries of good taste. It’s often said some PTSD from his Second World War experiences might explain things.

    Sykes has been repeated on Forces TV recently.

  7. Glenn Aylett

    March 26, 2022 at 10:44 am

    @ Richardpd, Milligan could be amusing, some of the sketches in the Q series like the Dalek one are timeless, but the endless references to Nazis became boring. One series I did quite like and was repeated a few times in the eighties was There’s A Lot Of It About, where the Nazi jokes were rarer and Milligan peformed a series of madcap sketches and sent up organisations like the GLC and The Salvation Army.

    • Tom Ronson

      March 27, 2022 at 11:24 pm

      There’s A Lot Of It About was originally six episodes, but was later hacked down to three ‘best of’ compilations which were shown in 1985 and again in 1989. I think the reason it had a different feel to the Q series was down to the presence of Andrew Marshall and David Renwick in the writers’ room. Simply Media tried to clear it for a DVD release, but unfortunately one episode uses a chunk of Laurel and Hardy’s film Swiss Miss, and Universal (who now own the lion’s share of L&H’s back catalogue) weren’t happy about it.

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