Race protests: Gone With The Wind, Little Britain and comedies by Chris Lilley pulled by streaming services

ABC reviews content as streaming services axe programming such as Gone With The Wind and Chris Lilley shows.

TV shows by Chris Lilley and movies such as Gone With the Wind have been pulled from streaming services.

Gone with the Wind has been pulled from US streaming service HBO Max along with comedies featuring Australian Chris Lilley on Netflix and the BBC’s Little Britain as entertainment companies re-examine the content they offer in the wake of protests for racial justice and against police brutality.

Lilley shows and the ABC

The four Lilley shows removed from Netflix — Angry Boys, Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes and Jonah from Tonga — have been unavailable for viewing on ABC platforms such as iview for at least two years, according to the broadcaster.

“We are reviewing our content to ensure it meets current community standards and reflects our editorial policies on harm and offence,” ABC TV said in a statement.

“Community attitudes change across time and context, and we recognise that the ways in which some characters have been depicted in the past might be considered deeply objectionable or offensive today.”

Australian streaming service Stan has removed Little Britain.

Gone with HBO

Considered a classic of American cinema and winner of eight competitive Academy Awards, including best picture, the 1939 film Gone with the Wind starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel tells the story of southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and her love affair with Rhett Butler. Much of the four-hour film is set on the O’Hara plantation, Tara, and in Atlanta during and after the Civil War.

There are now reports it may be restored next week, but with a disclaimer

.

Are we going to pull all of the movies in which women are treated as sex objects too? Guess how many films we’ll have left?Where does this end?? https://t.co/Bh8mqpv0l3

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

HBO Max parent AT&T’s move came amid growing concerns about racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer. The arrest of Floyd, who was heard uttering “I can’t breathe” while the officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, was caught on video and has led to global outrage over police brutality, with protests continuing throughout the US for two weeks.

The killing has also started to shine a light on cultural insensitivity and race relations that is now hitting the entertainment industry.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh's iconic screen kiss from Gone With The Wind.

‘Times have changed’

HBO is not alone. Little Britain has been removed from iPlayer because “times have changed” since the comedy first aired, the BBC says. The series, starring David Walliams and Matt Lucas, has come under fire recently because of the use of blackface in some sketches.

Walliams sported black make-up and a large afro wig to play the overweight black woman Desiree DeVere.

Lucas also used blackface to play Pastor Jesse King, who said he was “from the ghetto” and spoke in tongues to cure the sick.

A BBC spokesman said: “There’s a lot of historical programming available on BBC iPlayer which we regularly review. Times have changed since Little Britain first aired, so it is not currently available on BBC iPlayer.”

Last week, Netflix also removed the show, as well as Walliams and Lucas’s other series Come Fly With Me.

David Walliams and Matt Lucas in character from Little Britain.

In that show Lucas wore dark make-up to play Jamaican woman Precious and ground crew employee Taaj, who was of Pakistani descent.

Lucas has since said he has regrets about Little Britain, describing the comedy as “cruel”.

He told The Big Issue: “If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites. I wouldn’t play black characters.

“Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now.

“Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved. There was no bad intent there — the only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play.

“Now I think it’s lazy for white people to get a laugh just by playing black characters. My aim is to entertain, I don’t have any other agenda.”

Netflix has removed four comedy shows featuring Chris Lilley from its platform in Australia and New Zealand. The four programs, Angry Boys, Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes and Jonah From Tonga were originally produced by Princess Pictures for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Lilley as Ricky Wong.

Chris Lilley as character “S.Mouse’’.

Angry Boys features blackface character S.mouse, while Summer Heights High and Jonah From Tonga include Jonah Takalua, for which Lilley wore brown makeup. In We Can Be Heroes, Lilley plays Chinese physics student Ricky Wong.

The long-running show Cops, a reality program which showed the police in a very favourable light, was cancelled by the Paramount Network. Another pro-police reality show, Live PD, has been pulled from the schedule of the A&E Network, which said it did not know when the program would return.

Gone with the Wind, with its portrayal of happy slaves, has long been a lightning rod and criticised for its romanticism of slavery and that era of American history.

McDaniel won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Mammy, a house slave, becoming the first black actor to win an Academy Award.

HBO Max just removed Gone With the Wind from its platform citing concerns about racial injustice.

Here is the video of Hattie McDaniel becoming the first African-American to win an Academy Award for her role as Mammy in the film. pic.twitter.com/l0vh8pdpex

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 10, 2020

On Monday, John Ridley, who won an Oscar for the adapted screenplay for the movie 12 Years a Slave, a brutal look at slavery in the US, wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times calling for Gone with the Wind to be taken off HBO Max.

“It is a film that glorifies the antebellum South. It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of colour,” Ridley wrote.

The film, he said, perpetuated “the racism that’s causing angry and grieving Americans to take to the streets”.

Gone with the Wind may return to the platform down the road but with an explanation or note attached to it explaining its history and controversies, which was how the movie was presented on the Turner Classic movie channel.

The Wall Street Journal