I Watched 24 Hours of 'Love Thy Neighbour' So That You Don't Have To
Monday is movies. Or TV. Today it's one of the most shameful sitcoms in the history of the modern world.
The convenient excuse is to suggest that something happened when times were different, but time is an abstract concept – the times themselves were not different, we have been stretching time and having it constrict on us since long before we were aware of a way to even measure time. Time was never different, attitudes were. Attitudes change because we become aware of alternate viewpoints, we listen to the person or group that wasn’t previously heard from – or more likely just couldn’t be heard, and we may measure that with the passing of time. But we should measure it in leaps of awareness, in increments of ignorance.
So rather than tell you that Love Thy Neighbour occurred 50 years ago and finished 45 years ago, I should say that it took place a thousand ignorances ago, there have been at least 4,000 leaps in awareness since then. (And it’s not the right nor required amount, alas).
I remember re-runs of Love Thy Neighbour when I was a kid. I remember the grandparents laughing. I remember people doing that naughty/pretend-shocked laugh. Ooh, I shouldn’t be laughing at this should I, but I’m laughing with it because there’s a laugh-track and that tells me that I must.
Recently I worked through Love Thy Neighbour: The Complete Series – nine seasons, a feature film, a Xmas special and the original unaired pilot. It can be a blurred line that divides cultural criticism and self-flagellation – and in my ‘time’ never more so than attempting to see the point of Love Thy Neighbour, specifically the point of it in 2022
Are we supposed to laugh and shake our head? Are we supposed to consider that it was once a very real logic that the “racism went both ways” as the show’s creators always hid behind? Are we supposed to find the set-ups to the pantomime aspect funny if the punchline is always punching down and punching brown and ‘punching’ with verbal fists of fear rather than sharp tongues of wit?
There’s really no reason you might watch this now – and owning it is not quite like worshiping a statue of a plantation owner or hanging a confederate flag on your wall but is it the TV-comedy box-set version of that? Yes! Yes, it is.
For those still reading that needed to know some more background: Love Thy Neighbour was a crude sitcom that ran for 8 seasons across 1972-1976 and had a working class, dumb white guy filled with entitlement and rage, complaining about his black neighbours. And mostly the complaints were directly spat at the faces of his black neighbours. He could sexualise the wife, because she was a black woman. But the husband was just a monkey that lived next door – it mattered not that he was a smarter man. He was black you see. So the ‘jokes’ were words like ‘nig-nog’ and ‘Sambo’. And these were hilarious! The laugh-track told you.
Hangdog-weary and brow-beaten and crestfallen and bemused, black neighbour would call his racist next-door frenemy Big White Chief and ‘honky’. And this apparently passed for “racism going both ways”.
This TV show actually was, arguably, a mirror for the time. In the UK in the 1970s there was racism directed at Jamaican people living in the same streets and breathing the same air as the Queen’s fallen foot soldiers. How very dare they. Apparently, a broad sitcom mocking this racism by developing new and extra slogans for the battle was just the approach. Well, this can fuck right off now. Just as it should have done then.
Oh, you can’t say that though – it was funny then, and you weren’t old enough to understand. Things were different then. They were different times. No, you just enjoyed dumber comedy that elevated you because you were on the ‘right’ side of it. The joke was not on you so the joke must have been funny eh?
This lacks sophistication, wit, charm or true social commentary. It is a horror-show that mirrored some of the worst of the world, offering neither escape from it nor criticism of it.
And if you are a sucker for punishment you can work through 9 discs across 24 hours of footage. That’s an excruciating day right there.