I, as did millions, love Mind Your Language. It is very very funny unlike today's shows where you cant say this, where you cant do that or you will offend someone sitting in Timbaktu.
The fun is dead.
[deleted]
yes, Mind Your Language is offending, but the shows they are making these days, like Little Britain, are very cultured!!!
sharei'm pakistani muslim (just like ali!) and i never found this show offensive - not when i first saw it back in 1996, nor as i go back to it as an 18 year old today. many other pakistani's would also agree, because even within my family this show was an absolute favourite. there is a very thin line that is readily crossed when it comes to shows that target stereotypes - but for me, mind your language played with the issue very intelligently. a lot more intelligently than any show could pull off today. in mind your language's case, you often see the british locals (mr. brown, ms. courtney, sid, gladys) also being played down because of their naive outlook on the world around them, so it's not only the immigrant students that are being 'made fun of' so to speak. it's a very relatable and accurate portrayal of the clashing of a variety of cultures... in a light-hearted kind of way that appeals to everyone. i would find this show offensive if it seemed to echo racism with intent and deep-rooted hatred. but it didn't. it was funny and even more so because it -didn't take itself seriously-. the more politically correct we get, we fail to realize that sometimes you just need to relax and have a good laugh. we're humans, we're full of prejudice, why deny it?
White people are invited to control the meaning of racism, and politics in general, through (ironically) minding their language. The whole PC/anti-PC can be seen as a power struggle by dominant social groups about what constitutes racism--and each contesting group primarily defines racism as discourse (words and such) and individual psychology rather than in more concrete ways (economics, politics) . I rarely hear people of nonEuropean ethnic descent talking about political correctness.
shareIndeed - the problem is the people who are 'offended' by this show are not in Timbuktu, they are more likely to be in Islington or Hampstead!
I disagree with you blaming only white people for this. At least in the US, minorities get offended over the slightest slip of the tongue. Then we get a news scandal that lasts for weeks. It is so tiresome.
Take Avatar for example, people bringing race into it.
I just wanted to put a few words to this post (perhaps a little bit off the topic) - last weekend I took break from watching Mind Your Language on DVD to watch Formula 1 Australian GP on TV and one moment some engineer from Ferrari had to give some informations to Felipe Massa and believe me his voice, accent, the way he was talking was IDENTICAL to what Giovanni was doing in the class. So in a PC look-on-world perhaps we should abolish Italians from speaking English on tv, because that is stereotypical...
I've just seen the whole Mind Your Language series (at least what is available on DVD) and I haven't slightest idea what PC has to do with it? I mean literally which part of it is racial, because I can't find any evidence to support such statement - all the foreigners were shown in a worm way, all of them were sympathetic, I can't recall any racial remarks made... so what exactly is the problem?
I'm affraid that this is the same problem that I've noticed in other series that I like - Only When I Laugh: I've read somewhere that Gupta's character was racist because he was presented as incompetent. I know the series pretty well and I don't think that people that writing those reviews have seen much of the episodes, because usually Gupta was fixing other people mistakes and not his own (except for the first episode).
Same in MYL - if you will see just few scenes it may seem as they are being shown in a bad way, but if you would take a look at the whole series you would notice that they are not shown as stupid, ignorant or incompetent, they are clever in their own way, f.e. Juan sometimes only pretends not to understand, Giovanni, Ali, Ranjeet and Taro are making jokes in foreign language - those are the symptoms of intelligence.
The trouble with "PC" is that it thinks we're all stupid and have to be led through life by the hand. These people think they're our betters and need to guide us past all the obstacles and nastiness inlife - they think that if we watch Mind Your Language we'll believe it to be a documentary and go around thinking all foreigners are silly and not very bright.
What they don't realise is that we can distinguish between real life and entertainment. Father Ted never gets any stick, yet it portrays exagerated Irish stereotypes (brilliantly and hilariously). But of course that was a Channel 4 show, with a more intelligent target audience than the plebs who would have watched Mind Your Language and immediately gone out Paki-bashing.
I'm a Prick With a Fork.
Right! This was such a warm-hearted loving fun, but today´t PC can´t stand it. They censored MYL on Youtube, for example in the first episode they cut the scene of Ranjeet and Ali fighting off.
share