The Melting Pot

Imagine, if you can, something so racist it was considered too racist to be shown on British telly in the 1970s. Then imagine Spike Milligan made something even worse – even more racist – than Curry and Chips. The Melting Pot's pilot – written by Spike and regular collaborator Neil Shand – was shown as part of Comedy Playhouse in June 1975, with a full series commissioned and filmed to be aired in August of '76. But that series was never shown. Almost fifty years on, let's sit through it and find out why.

First we need to get into the pilot, nicely set up with reliable YouTube comments about being the finest comedy ever made, and that “Spike foresaw the future” of today's broken Britain, as in the dead of night, a pair of illegal immigrants conned by a small boat for £500 scramble ashore onto Whitstable beach. This is Mr. Van Gogh (Spike) and his son, Mr. Rembrandt (John Bird), both lacquered in boot polish, heads constantly bobbling, fingers forever waggling, continuing the established form of portraying South Asians as malfunctioning robots. Like Curry and Chips, they're very much doing the 'bud-bud ding-ding' voice British schoolchildren tormented Indian shopkeepers with in the eighties. The get-out for Curry and this is always 'It's fine because Spike was Indian, he was born there!' Well yes, to white Irish/English parents. He's as ethnically Indian as Bernard Manning is Japanese.

Hitching a ride to London (“Are you sure we are showing the right thumb?” “No, that is the left thumb”) sets up the series' obsession with mashing two cultures together for comic effect, riding in a lorry transporting 'Giovanni Batisti's Yorkshire Puddings – like mum makes'. Another thing we'll be seeing a lot of, as with the trucker, is the reveal that a plummy voiced posho we've heard but not seen turns out to be a black man. For another fee, the pair are given new passports by their contact, the Home Secretary, and sent to a boarding house in Piles Road, whose door's opened by huge-breasted South African housekeeper, Nefertiti (emphasis on titty). She's played by Alexandra Dane, an actress one can visualise from character names alone, in small roles in the Carry Ons, like Up The Kyber's Busti, Again's Stout Woman, and from Behind, Lady in Low Cut Dress.

“Good evening, madam. To both of you.” The lads collapse multiple times at the mere existence of her legs and cleavage, at one point a cup of prop tea going all over Bird as Spike fails to catch it when he faints. A boom mic creeps into frame, and we meet the landlord, Frank Carson, bellowed North Irish accent supplemented by a paramilitary style beret. It's fitting headwear, as they've migrated to an exceedingly hostile nation, taking that vibe of the post-Office sitcoms of Ricky Gervais, where everyone's rude to each other all the time for no reason, and giving that aggression a strong racial focus.

The pilot's big story is Spike buying second hand shoes out of a newspaper. When approaching the address, the Colonel who lives inside panics, “there's a w*g coming up the garden path!” and fires a rifle through the letterbox, puncturing Spike's bag of rice. What comes next is a frenetic twenty-second microcosm of all British telly of the '70s. Spike runs off in the shoes, the Colonel yells “stop that w*g!” and Spike blind-hops a small wall, triggering a cat screech sound effect, before lifting a dead cat into frame by the tail. From a balcony, Rita Webb waves her fist and angrily shouts “You bugger! You've killed my N****r!” Then a well-spoken policeman who's (brace yourselves) black asks “Pardon me sir, who has killed a n****r?”

Frank Carson's boarding house for illegals is creaking at the seams, with three black men crammed into the bathroom; two sharing a double bed and the third in a hammock slung up above the sink. Spike sleeps on top of a cupboard, and with his long white hair, looks rather like late-period Richard Harris. We meet the other boarders, which includes a Chinese cockney in a gollywog jumper played by a white man with prosthetics around his eyes. The pilot ends with everyone but Spike and Bird nodding off in front of the telly, where the news reports that police have given up looking for them, after they disappeared into “that part of London which is known as the Melting Pot.” Now confirmed English, they stand for the National Anthem at closedown.

So then, the full series. For decades, The Melting Pot was one of the most notable pieces of lost media, until the entire thing showed up last year on Archive.org to no reaction, leaving the dirty business of actually watching to old muggins Millard here. Thanks a bleedin' bunch. Titles are a bombastic Land of Hope and Glory over a fluttering Union Jack, and footage of Royals on the balcony rolling alongside black youths in markets. Spike and Bird have a noticeably lighter dusting of cocoa powder than the pilot, but are still browned up, and in their housemates we've a full Mind Your Language United Nation of stereotypes, almost all recast from the Comedy Playhouse.

Joining the two leads around the breakfast table are a young Brummy black man, a keffiyeh-wearing Arab, John Bluthal as a Jewish fella, Hancock's Bill Kerr a drunken Aussie, and in place of his white predecessor, Chinese cockney Burt Kwouk. The whole race-mashing's in full swing, as the Arab's got a thick Scottish accent, while the black Brummy's name is Luigi O'Reilly. Incidentally, for the pilot, none of them were credited with character names in the Radio Times, just nationalities, i.e. 'Irish Landlord,' 'Scottish Arab,' and in the case of Luigi, 'Coloured North Countryman'.

“It weren't too long ago your lot was eating missionaries,” says Kwouk to Luigi. These breakfast table scenes take up a third to half of each episode, consisting entirely of everyone disparaging each other's ethnicity. Even though I'm pretty desensitised to horrible old racism, and despite all the facial hair clearly having been cut out of cloth with a pair of scissors, it's jarringly unpleasant to see Burt Kwouk say the n-word. The bants are interrupted by a pinging sound as Nefertiti screams “Oh, God, my bra straps have gone!” The priapic men let out moans and the table shakes, unified across all colours, religions and creeds by some massive tits. Nefertiti has been retooled from mere housekeeper to Carson's prodigiously-jugged daughter, permanently leant over so they're hanging loose, boobs heaved up and out like a tavern wench at a renaissance faire; the sort of breasts which seemed to exist only in the 1970s, like two bald heads made of jelly. Bird's always engineering reasons to push his face into them, and Carson once refers to her as “our knockers queen.” And gawd save 'em!

Any wonderful sparks of Spike's comedy mind are few and far between, the sole laugh I found in seven episodes when Carson snatches Spike's passport from his hand and informs him the photograph inside is of Reg Varney. Instead, lines like “Van Gogh? He's more like a bloody van driver!” Meandering and plotless, it's comprised of everyone being racist to each other, in long, long takes where they're fumbling over lines and corpsing, but have to keep going. These fifteen minute scenes at the table feel more of an endurance test than what Marilyn Burns went through in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And on top of that, across the whole run, Spike's trying to disrupt things for real by 'accidentally' flinging things around set, flicking mashed potato and whatnot, or deliberately spilling tea all over himself, to put the others off, giving proceedings an unpredictable, dangerous air. In episode 3, he smashes his fist down on the handle of a fork, sending it flying across the table at Bluthal, hitting him in the chest and causing him to break character, with a look on his face like “fuck me, if that'd gone in my eye, we'd have had a problem.”

The Melting Pot is a world – entirely accurately for Britain of the time – where absolutely everyone is a big racist, the system included. Buses don't stop when Spike puts his hand up, his very presence often inciting gasps of disgust, and when he and Bird are accosted in the street by a drunk, a policeman asks the drunk “are these two w*gs bothering you?” Episode two sees a trip to a pub where rowdy Germans are seig heiling, and the Colonel shows up to call the pair “black bastards.” Also notable here, a dog which downs two pints of beer straight from the glass, reminding me of a dog my grandad once told me about in his local who'd tap its owner on the arm with a paw until they lit a cigarette and placed it in the dog's mouth, wherein it would smoke the whole thing and commence impatiently tapping again.

This is a multi-cultural Britain where everyone's a stereotype – Aussies are drunk, Irish thick, Jews money-obsessed, and woman have enormous hooters – and they all hate each other. But with no slur unsaid, and no dissenting voices, they can't even try the In Sickness and in Health line: 'oh, we're laughing at the silly racists and not the racist things they say!' There's no irony, no satirical point; we're all just here to giggle at slurs. The most egregious epithets-for-laffs comes when Nefertiti spills entirely out of her dress running in to find her black cat dead after swallowing the cuckoo from a clock. Repeating both the joke (and the dead cat prop) from the pilot, she shrieks “Oh, my N****r, what have you done to my lovely N****r?” Spike replies “Your lovely n****r is upstairs in bed.” I actually took an n-word tally. A single use in episodes 1, 2, 5, and 6, none in episode 4, and thirteen in this one. Melting Pot favours the chaotic ending, room filling with every character – including another Chinese man and a Geisha who thought they were in Buckingham Palace – as Carson and Spike respectively smash a stuffed cat and dog against a table while a women with jumbo jugs hanging out wails “my N****r, my N****r!” and Land of Hope and Glory blares from the speakers. (note, the Chinese characters turn up in another episode, offering a hearty “ah-so!”)

It's a blend of comedy's two most wretched genres; racism and the Comedy of Confusion; every other line Spike misinterpreting the line which preceded it. “You remind me of my late husband.” “Oh, he's late, is he? Is he working overtime?” But finding aspects of British culture to be confused by is evidently not that fertile a ground, and two separate episodes have identical riffs on use-by dates. Many performers struggle with their given accents, causing a considerable amount of lines to get lost beneath poor diction. Worst of all is the young Luigi, an appalling actor among a talented cast who are all slumming it, with whom you can see the cogs turning in his head as he dredges each line from memory. At points, the entire thing seems on the verge of collapse, Spike even being whispered a line he's blanked on.

Stylistically, it's one of those sitcoms where there's no plot to speak of. Most comedies, you can describe an episode by the story, like “they go to the mainland” or “they try to avoid the football scores” but with The Melting Pot? “Err, they're sat round a table and Burt Kwouk says black people only climbed down from trees yesterday.” Richard Richard wants to have it off. Harold Steptoe wants to escape the yard. Del Boy wants to be rich. Here, nobody has any motivation beyond sniping at each other's skin colour. When something does happen, even flatly describing it seems like I'm testing if my readers will realise I've been making everything up all this time and don't even own a television.

Regard the end to episode one. Spike buys a goat and hides it in the cupboard (“What about the smell?” “He'll get used to us”), and when Carson hears it bleating at night, he assumes one of the tenants has been turned into a goat by the Hindu god Gupta, sneaking in a Catholic priest to douse “the poor heathen w*gs” in buckets of holy water. Cue everyone rushing in, and even a little person (Willie Shearer) and his giantess wife emerging from the wardrobe, amid a ferocious argument under the scroll of credits; Nefertiti in lingerie, loose goats, and Spike getting a bucket of water in the face. The series was produced (and perhaps directed, in the era that role was considered so inconsequential, it often wasn't credited) by Ian McNaughton, giving us a direct link between The Melting Pot and English for Beginners. Oh, and Python.

Half the lines would probably get me booted off Patreon if I typed them verbatim, and all the jolly banter has the racial subtlety of Twitter's For You feed; the Arab sat across from the show's Jewish character reading a book simple titled HITLER, bearing a big swastika on the cover. Actually, this is a good example of the two types of humour. “If Hitler were alive today, he'd be 82.” And how did Bluthal work that out? “Inflation.” Cue Spike: “What'd you mean? Someone inflated Hitler?” Oh, to die in a bunker from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and not have to have watched The Melting Pot. But with lines like “come back Hitler, all is forgiven!” perhaps the racism's a deliberate distraction from the sheer fucking ineptness. In one scene, the enormous lens of a bulky 1970's camera wheels into frame, half-covering Bluthal, before slowly backing only halfway out again. In another episode, we pull back so far as he dances the Hava Nagila, the bottom third of frame contains the grey studio floor beyond the boarding house carpet.

But hold your horses for an exciting development; episode four's got some plot! Forgive me as I lay it out in agonising detail. Spike has well-bad neck-ache – after trapping it in a window, from which his son tries to get him loose as Nefertiti walks in and thinks they're bumming – and goes to the doctor. The waiting room's a highlight reel of the era; a child (played by a little person) with a chamber pot on their head, Julie Breck as a nurse with gargantuan wobblers hanging out, and a black man called Umgulu Umgulu who needs to be shouted at through an oversized ear trumpet. “Ooh,” says a woman, “it's a fella on a stretcher.” “Did you hear that?” asks Spike, “they've been stretching him.” The doctor has a bust of Hitler on his desk and screams with fright when confronted by two Indians, causing his monocle to fall out. Exclaiming “Gott in himmel, schwartzes!” ('God in Heaven, blacks') he chucks a pair of wigs and teeth at them, advising “zere is nothing else I can do for you, you vill be zat colour until the day you die!”

On the way home, Spike's run over by the Colonel and given the kiss of life, farts noisily billowing out of his arse with each puff, but seen by the posh black policeman who thinks they're being gay – “naughty, naughty men!” Put in traction, the only spare hospital bed's in the maternity ward for the wild weekly ending, everyone crowded round on Spike's birthday for which Nefertiti's baked a curried cake; of course, ending up in his face as a black nurse gives him a baby to feed. Roll credits. The Colonel – whose full name, by the way, is Colonel Grope – is seen the following week holding a rally for the actual proper National Front at speaker's corner, and in a joke that's still being told today, Spike tells him “you are not white, you're red!”

It's impossible not to compare this to Curry and Chips, but where that was much more focussed in its take on race, centring on the white British mistrust of minorities, Melting Pot's philosophy is that the world's nationalities are unable to get along, their only common ground that while they hate each other, they hate all the other races too. Plentiful forth wall breaking generally consists of asides to an audience who are assumed to be as bigoted as the characters, and though I'm sure it was sold as a satire, it doesn't appear to be satirising anything, perhaps its one attempt with the strains of An English Country Garden over a pan across a public park covered in litter. In watching, you're unable to shake the grubby mental picture of Spike and Neil Shand trying to shock each other into laugher with racially provocative lines, like Bill Kerr's euphemism for having a poo, “I was trying to strangle a darkie.” Much of it's not even in the guise of a joke, i.e. Carson just bellowing “shut up, you w*gs!”

The last episode crosses the half-way mark before the breakfast scene's done, quickly cramming a series' worth of plots into the remaining twelve minutes. Spike dyes his beard to look younger so he can get a job, and after Julie Breck's tits jiggle at the job centre, he and Bird are hired as road sweepers. There's at least a cameo from Ron Pember, before they end up in court after a shoving match with the Colonel over some horse manure, where the lady judge is wearing a National Front pin and fines the “two Asian Jews” £8 before everyone stands and sings God Save the Queen. The Colonel then finds Spike working as a lift operator in Harrods, and is taken away by Bird who's now a policeman. The lift doors open for a group of top-hatted hooray Henrys to come out; and you'll never guess what – they're all black! Spike drops to one knee and the Queen (Jeanette Charles; more of a Queen to me than Camilla will ever be!) knights him. The end.

This kind of stuff usually plays to the depressing cackles of a live audience rocking in their seats and loving every minute, but those in the stands for the tapings – for fifty years, the only witnesses to these six half-hours – seem only slightly less baffled than modern viewers would be, offering polite chuckles. Having sat through the whole ruddy affair, I can confirm the BBC made the right move pulling the plug, I just can't pin down whether it's more offensive than it is just plain rubbish.