''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 BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's flagship network and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television bulletins, ...

in June 1976, with a full series recorded the following August but never broadcast. Milligan played Mr. Van Gogh (in

brownface Brownface is a social phenomenon in which a white or light-skinned person attempts to portray themselves as a "brown" person of color, but less overtly and with a lighter complexion than traditional blackface. This may include mimicry of Midd ...

) 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, 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 U-matic is an analogue recording videocassette format first shown by Sony in prototype in October 1969, and introduced to the market in September 1971. It was among the first video formats to contain the videotape inside a cassette, as oppo ...

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 Hugh Francis Carson KSG (6 November 1926 – 22 February 2012) was a Northern Irish comedian and actor from Belfast. He was best known for being a regular face on television for many years from the 1970s onwards, appearing in series su ...

as Paddy O'Brien: an Irish Republican landlord and coalman *

Alexandra Dane Alexandra Dane (born ''c''. 1940
''London Evening Standard'' (17 November 2011). Retrieved ...

as Nefertiti Skupinski: O'Brien's voluptuous, South African-bred daughter *Wayne Brown as Luigi O'Reilly: a black Yorkshireman *

Harry Fowler Henry James Fowler, MBE (10 December 1926 – 4 January 2012) was an English character actor in film and television. Over a career lasting more than six decades, he made nearly 200 appearances on screen. Personal life Fowler was born in Lamb ...

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 John Bluthal (born Isaac Bluthal; 12 August 1929 – 15 November 2018) was a Polish-born Australian actor and comedian, noted for his six-decade career internationally in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He started his career ...

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 The Bank of Scotland plc (Scottish Gaelic: ''Banca na h-Alba'') is a commercial and clearing bank based in Scotland and is part of the Lloyds Banking Group, following the Bank of Scotland's implosion in 2008. The bank was established by th ...

, Peckham *

Robert Dorning Robert Dorning (13 May 1913 – 21 February 1989) was a musician, dance band vocalist, ballet dancer and stage, film and television actor. He is known to have performed in at least 77 television and film productions between 1940 and 1988. Origin ...

as Colonel Grope: an ex-

Indian Army The Indian Army is the land-based branch and the largest component of the Indian Armed Forces. The President of India is the Supreme Commander of the Indian Army, and its professional head is the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), who is a four- ...

, alcoholic racialist *

Bill Kerr William Henry Kerr (10 June 1922 – 28 August 2014) was a British and Australian actor, comedian, and vaudevillian. Born in South Africa, he started his career as a child actor in Australia, before emigrating to Britain after the Second Wor ...

as Bluey Notts: an Australian bookie's clerk, a crude racialist

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

Cast

See also

References

External links