the black & white minstrel show

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Kenneth Lamb, Director of Public Affairs, wrote to CARD’s Chairman, David Pitt, arguing that ‘black-faced minstrels performing a song and dance act have been a traditional form of entertainment in the British Isles for a great many years. We had this music at home as an LP-disc, the CD brings back many happy memories, great songs in great and enthusiastic performances. In it, he told the Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, that “The Uncle Tom attitude of the show in this day and age is a disgrace and an insult to coloured people everywhere”. The Minstrels also had a theatrical show at the Victoria Palace Theatre, produced by Robert Luff, [4] which ran for 6,477 performances from 1962 to 1972, and established itself in The Guinness Book of Records as the stage show seen by the largest number of people.

You must take reasonable care to ensure that an item is repackaged so that it arrives back in the same condition it was despatched. Having left the Victoria Palace Theatre, where the stage show played from 1962 to 1972, a second show toured almost every year to various big city and seaside resort theatres around the UK, including the Futurist in Scarborough, the Winter Gardens in Morecambe, the Festival Theatre in Paignton, the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne and the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth. The Minstrels sang and danced as a group, often on sets styled like the Southern United States, and always with a smile. This continued every year until 1989, when a final tour of three Butlins resorts ( Minehead, Bognor Regis, and Barry Island) saw the last official Black and White Minstrel Show staged. The response Thorne received from the Chief Assistant, Oliver Whitley, was no doubt intended to come across as measured.

Forgive me for saying simply that I don't believe anything in your memo is half so relevant as the (to me) plain fact that wherever precisely the rights and wrongs might be in the matter in a community of infinitely greater kindness and consideration than, unfortunately, ours is, this protest as things are does much more harm than good. H. Elliott, singing in blackface, spawned so many imitators that he started referring to himself as ‘the original chocolate coloured coon’. BBC officials gave interviews to The Times, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Mirror stating that ‘the show is not about race’, but ‘tradition’.

The Black and White Minstrel Show was a British light entertainment show that ran for twenty years on BBC prime-time television.

It’s unlikely that what he had in mind was The Black and White Minstrel Show itself employing black British artistes. What’s harder to fathom is why, in an era in which tens of thousands of black people had long been settled in Britain or were trying to make it their home, a BBC which had already managed to reflect something of the reality of black British life in documentaries such as 1955’s Has Britain a Colour Bar? citation needed] At this time, the creation gained considerable international regard and was sold to over thirty countries; [ citation needed] in 1961, the show won a Golden Rose at Montreux for best light entertainment programme, and the first three albums of recordings (1960–1962) were all hits, the first two being long-running number 1 albums in the UK Albums Chart.

This recording sounds as if someone had merely put an old well worn record on to disc, crackles included. No doubt you have read the press comment and you will be very welcome, if you wish to see but have not seen, to borrow from the Secretary or H. Thorne raised the issue again in 1967 with Oliver Whitley, Chief Assistant to the BBC's director general, Sir Hugh Greene.One way of testing responsible opinion would be for the BBC to send the Black and White Minstrels book and the coloured Radio Times front cover of them to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, and ask for their opinion. My examination of home movies, held in archives such as MACE and the Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland indicates that the blackface at the heart of The Black and White Minstrel Show did make an impression on viewers, as ordinary Britons blacked up as minstrels in local pageants, parades and fairs throughout the postwar period. For the best part of the next twenty years it didn’t seem to occur to anyone in a position of authority at the BBC that the series really was offensive to more than just a few “killjoys”. Whitley responded: "The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: 'On this issue, we can see your point, but in your own best interests, for heaven's sake, shut up.

Among the various activities that we have planned for the biennium 2017/18, there is the Pet Therapy, for children and people with disabilities, but also for adults or older people who want to find an inner balance.

Originally, the Television Toppers were dancers who performed weekly on a television programme every Saturday night, alongside different celebrities, such as Judy Garland.