Monkhouse’s comedy, and the conventions that shaped it, belong to a bygone era of British entertainment. That does not make it shameful or malicious, but it does make it historically situated.
TV executives have become a favourite punchbag for the anti-woke press, and the Sun’s latest bout of outrage follows a familiar and weary script. This time, the paper has taken aim at ITV for placing a content warning on a re-run of Bob Monkhouse’s 1994 An Audience With…, informing viewers that the programme “reflects the language and attitudes of its time.”
Anyone of a certain age will remember Monkhouse fondly. A game-show host and stand-up who dedicated his life to making people laugh. Younger generations, however, are unlikely to have any such attachment. And why would they? Monkhouse’s comedy, and the conventions that shaped it, belong to a bygone era of British entertainment.
That does not make it shameful or malicious, but it does make it historically situated.
It is entirely reasonable, therefore, that ITV would contextualise a thirty-year-old programme for a modern audience. A brief warning does not condemn Monkhouse, censor his work, or prevent anyone from watching. It simply acknowledges an obvious truth, social attitudes change, and so does comedy. Viewers are also advised to enable parental controls, hardly a revolutionary act for a family-oriented streaming platform. It is, after all, standard practice on those numerous channels dedicated to re-running ancient TV programmes.
Yet for the Sun, this measured and mundane decision prompted a meltdown. ITV bosses, we are told, have gone “woke.”
The article leans heavily on the indignation of a single viewer, who decries the warning as “woke madness,” insisting that Monkhouse was “the most harmless and cherished comedian of his generation” and that his jokes were “family-related ones that anyone could enjoy.”
To emphasise the point, the paper reproduces some of Monkhouse’s best-known jokes, as though this settles the argument.
But the reaction is wildly disproportionate. No one is disputing Monkhouse’s popularity or professionalism. No one is suggesting his work should be erased or ‘cancelled.’
The idea that a short line of contextual information constitutes an attack on comedy, or worse, on free speech, is absurd. What is truly incredible is the fragility on display from those who claim to be defenders of common sense.
Comedy has changed. That’s not a scandal, it’s a fact. As society has become more aware of who jokes land on, humour has, on the whole, become kinder, sharper and more self-aware. Even satire has had to evolve. The reboot of Spitting Image failed spectacularly not because it was too cruel, but because reality had already rendered its targets grotesque beyond parody.
Monkhouse himself understood this perfectly. Reflecting on the evolution of television comedy, he once observed that while the jokes of mid-century stand-ups were not so different from those told today, sitcoms and films had become “more truthful and biting.” Comedy, he said, had shifted “from innocence to knowingness”.
Monkhouse grasped this cultural shift more clearly, it seemed, than those now using his name to wage a culture war. A content warning does not insult his legacy. It respects the audience. The real problem here is not “wokeness,” but a media so invested in grievance that even the mildest nod to historical context is treated as an existential threat.
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