British Comedy Guide

Love Thy Neighbour Page 4

He kidnapped me and killed my guinea pig.

No famous people have ever done anything to me! I still don't like half of 'em.

Yep, I remember Love Thy Neighbour. It reflected the times we lived in, and the nicknames were part of that era. It doesn't make the name calling right, but that still goes on in other guises. What was funny was the humour in the relationship between the two male characters.

Jack Smethhurst played a lazy bigot, you couldn't help laugh at, and Rudolph Walker a very sexy man that I certainly wouldn't say no to, even now. When I look at it like this it makes me wonder what the PC brigade were up in arms about.

Love Thy Neighbour is NOT racist!

I have just watched series One and how can this programe be considered racist when the two couples are friends and drink together in the pub etc... It was just harmless name calling we all have pet names for different friends etc and thats all this was, the fact that those names were OK to use in the 1970's justifies its existence... If Eddie went round to Bill's house and drove him out of the street with voilence and the National Front then that would be racist, but they clearly like each other and their is no hatred so it ain't racist IMO!

The PC brigade just don't get humour and by calling this racist just trivilises the real racist's ;)

Just read something very interesting on wikipedia about Jack Smethurst saying he was arrested for racial abuse because of a drunken rant at the lovely Nina Baden Semper. Now, anybody can put anything on wikipedia, so it could just be a rumour: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smethurst

Possible, but given the grammar of the sentence I'd take it with a pinch of salt.

I also like Love Thy Neighbour, the spin off movie was good also, we have watched it many times. I thought Patricia Hayes as Eddie's mother was brilliant.

I find it hilarious that society has devolved to the point where instead of humor dating, people forget how to get it.

Love Thy Neighbour wasn't about laughing at race, it was about laughing at racism.

Racism is stupid and absurd, therefore it is funny.

Love Thy Neighbour was part of life in the 1970s, I come from a working class background and most people loved it at the time. The viewing figures say it all. Another good show was Curry & Chips with Spike Milligan, but again this would not work in today's world.

Quote: Daniel O'Rourke @ March 14 2007, 9:32 AM GMT

Who remembers it?

I do.

Quote: Ronnie Anderson @ December 29 2009, 9:38 PM GMT

This would actually be a sitcom that is relevant and taking a good idea which didn't reach it's full potential

Uh, didn't it? I've seen it for the first time over the past year, and as far as I can see it's not really missing anything.

Love Thy Neighbour would have been a great series if the new couple next door had been Tories, and Eddie had been a staunch socialist. They could have used exactly the same scripts with only minor modifications.

The new couple's being black (rather than Tory) made the series very topical but it also made it rather tacky as the 'race humour' was neither subtle nor clever and, whether it intended to or not, it pandered to millions of otherwise decent but still rather racist viewers.

The jury will be out on this sitcom for a long time, I think.

The verdict on Curry & Chips is however more clear cut: it should be burned at the stake.

Quote: Veronica Vestibule @ November 20 2010, 12:54 PM GMT

Love Thy Neighbour would have been a great series if the new couple next door had been Tories, and Eddie had been a staunch socialist.

They were.

Quote: Aaron @ November 20 2010, 1:38 PM GMT

They were.

So they were black AND blue?

In that case, it seems the writer had a golden opportunity before him and failed to spot it.

What an absolutely brilliant series it would have been (in so many ways!) if he'd gone strongly for the Tory angle and their skin colour had never been mentioned!

Quote: Baumski @ March 14 2007, 7:49 PM GMT

It's a shame that this programme isn't and never will be repeated because that way it would, perhaps, educate all those people who never actually watched it because they weren't born at the time of transmition.

Love Thy Neighbour is still being repeated in Australia on free-to-air terrestrial TV. Australia had a vaguely similar sitcom in the early '80s called Kingswood Country, in which a dimwitted conservative bigot consistently referred to his Italian-Australian son-in-law as a "bloody wog". He also had a highly prized statue of an Aborigine on his front lawn.

^^ The idea of course being to laugh AT not WITH the dimwit in order to belittle the demographic of which he was a satirical construct.

Quote: Veronica Vestibule @ November 20 2010, 1:59 PM GMT

So they were black AND blue?

In that case, it seems the writer had a golden opportunity before him and failed to spot it.

What an absolutely brilliant series it would have been (in so many ways!) if he'd gone strongly for the Tory angle and their skin colour had never been mentioned!

They missed a golden opportunity to make one observation instead of two?

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