The Melting Pot (found BBC sitcom; 1975)

This article has been tagged as NSFW due to its racist subject matter.

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Cover of a book of scripts from the series.

Status: Partially Found

The Melting Pot is a British sitcom TV series starring Spike Milligan that was produced by the BBC in 1975. In the decades since its production, the series has become notorious for the fact that only one of it six produced episodes was ever broadcast, with the remaining five episodes never being released due to the unfunny and racist nature of the series' content.

Premise

The series starred Spike Milligan and John Bird (both in brownface) as Mr. Van Gogh and Mr. Rembrandt, a father and son pair of Pakistanis who illegally immigrate from Amsterdam to the UK by rowing boat before later hitching a ride into London in the back of a lorry advertising Yorkshire puddings. The pair arrive in a district of London known as the "Melting Pot", and find accommodation in a boarding house located in the fictional Piles Road that is run by Irish Republican coalman Paddy O'Brien (Frank Carson) and his voluptuous, South African-raised daughter Nefertiti Skupinski (Alexandra Dane).

The pair quickly mix themselves in with the other residents and visitors of the boarding house, who include Luigi O'Reilly (Wayne Brown), a black Yorkshireman, Eric Lee Fung (Harry Fowler), a Chinese cockney who specializes in selling illicit goods, Richard Armitage (John Bluthal), an Orthodox London Jew, Colonel Grope (Robert Dorning), an alcoholic and racist ex-officer of the Indian army, Bluey Notts (Bill Kerr), a crude and racist Australian bookie's clerk, and Sheik Yamani (Anthony Brothers), a Muslim Arab who speaks with a Scottish accent as a result of working at the Peckham branch of the Bank of Scotland.

History

The series was the creation of Spike Milligan and his regular collaborator Neil Shand and was written with the intent to ridicule discrimination and highlight the ignorance of such issues (in a similar vein to Curry and Chips, a previous sitcom starring Spike Milligan that also featured him in brownface playing a Pakistani character).

The pilot episode was produced in early 1975 and broadcast on June 11th of that year as an episode of Comedy Playhouse, a British anthology series that had previously served as the springboard for several successful British sitcoms, including Steptoe and Son, Are You Being Served?, and Last of the Summer Wine among others. This high-profile showcase resulted in a full series order for The Melting Pot, with a further five episodes being filmed in August. However, despite all six episodes being fully completed, the BBC would later quietly drop plans to air the remaining five, and would never acknowledge the series again.

No official reason for this decision has ever been given, but various explanations have been offered by different parties in the years since. Milligan himself believed that it was due to the series being insufficiently funny, and because of cast changes made between the pilot and the five remaining episodes. However, consensus among most others is that the race-based humor of the series was what ultimately led to its downfall.

Curry and Chips, despite its supposedly anti-racist message, had managed to draw criticism for being very racist itself, with much of the series' humor relying on racial abuse and Milligan's incredibly caricatured portrayal of a Pakistani character. As such, Curry and Chips proved to be a highly controversial program, with parent network ITV receiving many complaints from offended viewers and the Race Relations Board, resulting in the program being cancelled after just one series of six episodes. The pilot of The Melting Pot had similarly drawn criticism for its racist content (with a review in The Observer describing it as “the worst thing to happen to race relations since Pharaoh went sour on the Israelites”), so it is very likely that the BBC was trying to avoid a similar public relations disaster by quietly pulling The Melting Pot from broadcast.

Availability

The pilot episode of The Melting Pot would never be shown again after its single 1975 broadcast, and it is not fully available online as of now. However, previous online uploads of the pilot are known to exist, as a fanmade showreel of Spike Milligan's filmography features a brief clip of the pilot, which the uploader claimed to have sourced from a since-deleted Dailymotion upload of it.

The remaining five episodes of the series have never been publicly shown, however, and as a result, no footage or stills from them have ever surfaced. The only material from these episodes to have ever been made available is their scripts, which were published in a book in 1983 that can still be found and purchased online with relative ease.

A full copy of the pilot episode of The Melting Pot is known to exist within the BBC archives as a low-band U-matic video recording, and it could be assumed that archived copies of the remaining episodes also exist in some form as well. However, as a result of the series' offensive content that likely got it banned to begin with (along with a presumed lack of interest from the BBC), it is unlikely that the episodes will ever receive an official release.

Gallery

Showreel of Spike Milligan's filmography that features a clip from the broadcast pilot (4:45 - 4:56).

External Links

• Wikipedia page for The Melting Pot