When did we change our minds about Little Britain?

Little Britain is ‘explicitly racist and outdated’. That’s the verdict of viewers asked by Ofcom to watch a 2003 sketch from the hit BBC show. Back in the noughties, millions tuned in each week to watch the abominable David Walliams and Matt Lucas dress up as characters with names like Ting Tong Macadangdang and Bubbles DeVere. It’s reassuring that, 20 years on, people appear to have finally found their senses and realised something that was obvious at the time: Little Britain isn’t funny. But there’s also something troubling about this revisionism of a show that many millions of Brits adored.

The episode that raised alarm bells for viewers in the Ofcom survey featured Walliams as university admin officer Linda Flint. The conceit of the sketch was that Linda (who we would now probably call a ‘Karen’) had to describe a student sat in her office to jog the memory of a colleague over the phone.