Delingpole: BBC Slaps Woke Health Warning on Classic Sitcom Dad’s Army

Dads Army BBC
BBC Still
James Delingpole

The BBC has slapped a health warning on its greatest sitcom Dad’s Army.

Before airing a 1971 Christmas special of the classic sitcom, it issued a warning on BBC iPlayer: ‘Contains discriminatory language which some may find offensive.’

The ‘discriminatory language’ in question was the use of the phrase ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ by the doddery Corporal Jones (played by Clive Dunn) to describe the frizzy-haired warrior enemies the character fought in the Sudan in the late Nineteenth century wars against the Mahdi.

What’s so tone deaf about the decision is that it imputes offence where none was ever intended. The term ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ was late 19th century military slang to describe the distinctive big hair of the Beja warriors, whom soldiers like Corporal Jones respected as fearsome adversaries.

Rudyard Kipling even wrote a poem – titled Fuzzy-Wuzzy in their honour.

The final quatrain goes:

So ‘ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
An’ ‘ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ‘ayrick ‘ead of ‘air —
You big black boundin’ beggar — for you broke a British square!

This pays tribute to the moment when the Beja warriors of the Hadendowah tribe achieved the almost unheard-of feat, at the battle of Abu Klea, of breaking through the British square formation.

But that’s the BBC for you: determinedly tearing down its own heritage in a fit of iconoclastic zeal worthy of ISIS at Palmyra.

Along with Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, and Blackadder, Dad’s Army is widely recognised as one of the BBC’s all time great sitcoms.

Indeed, many aficionados would argue that its ‘Don’t Tell Him, Pike’ episode is probably the funniest moment in British comedy history.

The idea that something people should have been laughing at unashamedly and uncomplicatedly for the last half century now needs a health warning in 2020 is an indication of just how far our culture has declined under the poisonous influence of ‘woke’ culture.

Dad’s Army is, among other things, a tribute to the spirit of wartime Britain. It concerns one of the ‘Home Guard’ units of elderly veterans and boys as yet too young to enlist in the regular army, who took care of Britain’s civil defence in the early years of the Second World War when German invasion was a plausible threat.

At least two of its cast had seen action in the First World War. John Laurie, who played Private ‘We’re doomed’ Frazer, had served with the Honourable Artillery Company. Arnold Ridley, who played the mild-mannered and elderly Private Godfrey, fought hand to hand at the Somme with the Somerset Light Infantry, got bayoneted in the groin, smacked in the head with a German rifle butt, had his left hand rendered useless and his legs with riddled with shrapnel. But still, when the Second World War broke out, he volunteered to fight in that too.

It’s a sad reminder of the spirit Britain has lost and the cultural heritage it has rejected that the BBC is now in thrall to snivelling Social Justice Warriors like the widdling pillock who thought it was necessary to append that health warning to a Dad’s Army episode.

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