BLACK AND WHITE MINSTREL SHOW - REVISITED
Monday 8 August 2005 11.35pm-12.15am
Time Shift takes a dispassionate look at the now notorious show, whose blacked-up singing and dancing routines ruled the weekend schedules for 21 years.
MINSTREL INTERVIEW Les Want, Minstrel 1966-78
"None of us ever gave a thought to racism"
First broadcast in 1957, the Black and White Minstrel Show was intended as good clean family fun for a post-war Britain. But it was born into a changing world, airing at the same time as the 1958 Notting Hill riots - some of the worst racial violence the country had ever known.
To its devotees it was harmless escapism in the form of glamourous sing-along dance routines, but to others it had far less palatable connotations.
Time Shift tells the strange story of the rise and fall
- and disappearance - of The Black and White Minstrel Show. The once top-rated show was
effectively banned, but its legacy lives on as a strange infamy. That an innocently-intentioned show could, in just a generation, become such a screen pariah is one of the most extraordinary episodes in television history.
