''The Melting Pot'' is a British television situation comedy starring
Spike Milligan
Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was an Irish actor, comedian, writer, musician, poet, and playwright. The son of an English mother and Irish father, he was born in British Raj, British Colonial India, where h ...
. It was written by Milligan and his regular collaborator
Neil Shand
Neil Hodgson Shand (3 March 1934 – 14 April 2018) was a British television comedy writer.
He was born in Luton to parents from Glasgow, the son of a Vauxhall employee and a dressmaker. Neil was the eldest of three boys.
Raised in a "two up tw ...
. The pilot episode was broadcast only once on
BBC1 in June 1976, with a full series recorded the following August but never broadcast.
Milligan played Mr. Van Gogh (in
brownface) alongside John Bird as Mr. Rembrandt, father and son illegal Asian immigrants who are first seen being rowed ashore in England, having been told that the beach is in fact Piccadilly Circus.
[Mark Dugui]
"Race and the Sitcom"
BFI screenonline. Retrieved 12st November 2018. They hitch a ride to London in a lorry advertising Italian-made Yorkshire puddings, and find themselves at a boarding house in the fictional Piles Road, London WC2, run by Irish coalman Paddy O'Brien (Frank Carson) and his voluptuous daughter Nefertiti. The rest of the tenants include a black Yorkshireman, a Chinese cockney and a Scottish Arab. The "Melting Pot" of the title refers to the district of London where they have arrived.
The pilot episode, produced by Roger Race, was broadcast on BBC1 at 9:25 pm on 11 June 1976, and was followed by a recording of a full series of six episodes the following August.
Roger Race was replaced as director by Ian McNaughton, who had previously worked on Milligan's ''
Q5'' and ''
Q6'' series. However, the series was never transmitted. Milligan speculated that the programmes were perhaps insufficiently funny, or that cast changes made following the pilot episode had been an unwise decision. However, the popular consensus seems to be that the BBC disliked the racially insensitive nature of the series as a whole.
A book of the scripts of the series was published in 1983 by Robson Books, with illustrations by the cartoonist
Bill Tidy
William Edward "Bill" Tidy, Order of the British Empire, MBE (born 9 October 1933), is a British cartoonist, writer and television personality, known chiefly for his comic strips. Tidy was appointed Member of the Most Excellent Order of the Brit ...
, and Milligan later reused some of the situations and characters in his 1987 comic novel ''
The Looney''. The pilot episode remains in the BBC's archives in the form of a low-band
U-matic video recording,
while the seven-episode series was preserved on the original broadcast standard video tape.
Cast
*Spike Milligan as Mr Van Gogh: an illegal Pakistani immigrant
*
John Bird as Mr Rembrandt: Van Gogh's son, also an illegal immigrant
*
Frank Carson as Paddy O'Brien: an Irish Republican landlord and coalman
*
Alexandra Dane as Nefertiti Skupinski: O'Brien's voluptuous, South African-bred daughter
*Wayne Brown as Luigi O'Reilly: a black Yorkshireman
*
Harry Fowler as Eric Lee Fung: a Chinese cockney
spiv
In the United Kingdom, the word spiv is slang for a type of petty criminal who deals in illicit, typically black market, goods. The word was particularly used during the Second World War and in the post-war period when many goods were rationed du ...
*
John Bluthal as Richard Armitage: an Orthodox London Jew
*Anthony Brothers as Sheik Yamani: an Orthodox Arab who speaks with a Scots accent as he's been learning banking at the
Bank of Scotland, Peckham
*
Robert Dorning as Colonel Grope: an ex-
Indian Army, alcoholic racialist
*
Bill Kerr as Bluey Notts: an Australian
bookie's clerk, a crude racialist
See also
*
List of television series canceled after one episode
*
List of sitcoms notable for negative reception
References
*
*
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Melting Pot, The
BBC television sitcoms
1970s British sitcoms
1975 British television series debuts
1975 British television series endings
Television shows set in London
English-language television shows