Satirical Sitcom:
Till Death Us Do Part and All in the Family
(excerpt)
In an attempt to revolutionize the formulaic situation comedy, Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part (BBC, 1965–1975) and Norman Lear’s American remake, All in the Family (CBS, 1970–1979) introduced two of the first antiheroes in television.
Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) and Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) were both working-class patriarchs infuriated by the changing world around them. While Alf and the Garnetts were Cockneys living in a London East End tenement, Archie and the Bunkers were loud-mouthed New Yorkers residing in Queens. Speight and Lear aimed for the programs to give public domain to debates concerning prejudices in England and the United States, all while maintaining the traditional sitcom premise of family disputes and generational conflict. In order to expand the genre, the shows regularly tackled subjects previously deemed inappropriate for primetime TV, with arguments surrounding race, politics, and religion dominating weekly plot lines, and allowing the characters to spout offensive, particularly racist language on a regular basis.
This novel approach proved to be wildly popular. Ratings soared on both sides of the Atlantic, but the sitcoms were also met with considerable criticism for their possible contribution towards, and justification of prevalent racist attitudes. Till Death was accused of failing to give a voice to the minorities it claimed to support, with critics warning that audiences often agreed with Alf’s political views instead of mocking his bigotry. Reviews for All in the Family quickly followed suit.
When Till Death first aired on the BBC in 1965, Mitchell’s embodiment of Alf Garnett was unlike any leading character on television at the time. A Tory-voting, ill-educated, working-class monarchist with a vile temper, he refused to hear a bad word about the wealthy and loathed the country's growing population of Black and Asian immigrants.
Speight aimed to present a realistic portrait of Britain’s racial prejudice at the time, exposing Alf’s bigotry as a way to deflate racism in the UK. Racial storylines often focused on the rising Asian and Black immigrant population, which Alf considered detrimental to British “natives." He believed immigrants were different to the English both biologically and culturally, insisting that they were ultimately inassimilable within British society.
He also repeatedly accused immigrants of coming to Britain for the sole reason of taking advantage of the NHS: “As crafty as a bloody wagonload of monkeys, they are. Come over here they do an’ get all the false teeth an’ bloody false eyeballs they need, wooden legs, everything! Cop two thousand pounds an’ go home again, start up a business new men!” (Thou Shalt Not Steal, 1974).
When analyzing Till Death, it is important to note that Speight did not necessarily envision the series with a particularly racial agenda in mind. Rather, he aimed to utilize race as one of the mechanisms to offer social commentary and criticism of the generational and class differences in Britain.
Indeed, many reports saw the program not as a race comedy, but as a social and generational battlefield. Both the BBC and Speight argued that by allowing Alf Garnett to voice racist opinions, ordinary audiences would be forced to laugh at his bigotry, thus serving an educational purpose. In a 1975 interview, Speight commented on the matter of race: “There is still deep-seated racial prejudice in this country based on ignorance and fear. But my show brings it out in the open and tries to make people realize how silly it is.” This anti-racist agenda matched the BBC's policy on racial prejudice—in a memorandum on race relations, it was noted that the BBC shared the basic moral attitude that underpinned the Race Relations Act; their aim was to promote race relations while condemning racial prejudice.
Soon after the program first aired on the BBC, debates began to circulate about whether Alf was being presented as an object of ridicule or sympathy, the former positioning the show as a critique of small-minded bigotry, while the latter allowed audiences to identify with Alf’s racism, their justification apparent by the broadcast.
With an increasing number of racially motivated storylines, the BBC soon realized that audience reactions to the racial humor were unpredictable and diverse. During The Blood Donor, Alf sits with Mike in a hospital waiting room about to give blood when he notices a Black man seated a few feet away. He then lectures his son regarding the need to separate donated Black blood from white blood, causing a number of angry viewers to write in to the program.
One woman wrote to add weight to a negative response from a Black viewer on the BBC’s Talkback program, informing Controller of Programs Hugh Wheldon that “it was a very sad reflection to hear a colored fellow human being say that the immigrants thought we had something to offer them in Great Britain, but this was not so after seeing the disgusting behavior and comments by Garnett during the “Blood Donor” session.” Wheldon promptly sent a reply: “To say that Alf Garnett’s view of “coons” and giving blood donation to colored people confirms that Britain has nothing to offer immigrants is like seeing The Merchants of Venice and concluding that anti-Semitism is rife in the Home Counties.” Commenting on the same episode, another viewer praised the BBC for challenging racist theories in such an original way. Enid Hutchinson’s letter to the Director General reads: “I thought last night’s program of the Garnett family did more to root out false unscientific ideas about blood, race, and heredity than any number of earnest biology programs.”
These conflicting viewpoints continued for the duration of the program’s long run on the BBC, resulting in a seemingly endless debate surrounding audience reception. While the show aimed to expose the absurdity of racial prejudice in Britain, many scholars disagreed with Speight’s premise, criticizing the program’s approach toward tackling racial issues. The most prevalent criticism was that Speight had created a genuinely popular character in Alf, one who elicited support from audiences as well as affection, rather than disdain. Arguing that Till Death had the opposite desired impact on audiences, Angela Barry argues, “far from disparaging racism, the public airing of Alf’s prejudices give them a real legitimacy.”
Upon the show’s return in 1972, the Board of Governors requested that Head of Audience Research, Brian Emmett investigate whether Till Death “had tended to modify or reinforce viewers’ prejudice.” The report's findings were published in 1973, indicating that the program had an insignificant effect on British race relations: “There was no evidence that viewing the series has much (if any) direct effect on relevant attitudes and prejudices in either direction—despite the conviction of about one person in five that it can do harm. Viewers of the series are no more likely to be authoritarian in outlook or to be prejudiced against colored people, it seems, than they were before viewing; nor is there any evidence that the series has rendered prejudices risible to those who were not disposed to laugh at them already.”
Despite the overall conclusion, the report also showed evidence that the program did tend to make viewers slightly more prejudiced. Although changes in attitude were “likely to be slight,” only occurring among “small minorities,” they were also likely to “be in the direction of agreement with Alf Garnett.” The report showed that regular viewers were split down the middle over the statement that Alf was “right more often than he is wrong,” with 84 percent agreeing that “some of the things he says are true, if a little too extreme.” Audiences were shown to be more likely to view Black people as inferior to whites and more frequently in favor of stricter immigration laws. These conclusions quietly undermined the idea that Till Death served an effective anti-racist function, but the BBC chose instead to focus on the overall conclusion of the report, most likely due to the program’s resounding success.