Ooh, you are awful — and we need you back

There is a resurrection the machines could now perform, and almost nobody has asked them to attempt it.

Artificial intelligence has reached the point where a degraded archive can be lifted into clarity: grainy tape upscaled, a lost voice rebuilt from a handful of recordings, a vanished performer restored to something close to life. We use this power to colourise old footage and to make the dead sing in advertisements. We could, with no great difficulty, bring back the Dick Emery Show.

For eighteen years, between 1963 and 1981, Emery drew something near seventeen million viewers a week across one hundred and sixty six episodes. He was, alongside Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies, the ratings gold of British Saturday nights. Yet unlike them, he is almost never repeated. His characters survive only as catchphrases whose origins most people have forgotten: Mandy, the peroxide blonde who heard a filthy meaning in every innocent question and answered it with a shove and “Ooh, you are awful — but I like you”; Clarence, gloriously camp, sailing in on “Hello, honky tonks”; the toothy vicar, old Lampwick, College the educated tramp, Hettie the man hungry spinster. A vivid cast of comic grotesques, in the BBC’s own phrase, all played by one man.

The machine can restore the picture. What it cannot restore is the permission.

Emery has been quietly shelved because the present age has judged his work homophobic, racist and sexist, and therefore unshowable. The BBC still repeats Morecambe and Wise; it still repeats the Two Ronnies; Emery it leaves in the vault. This is the real cancellation, and artificial intelligence exposes it cleanly, because it strips away every excuse but the true one. The episodes exist. The tools to remaster them in pristine quality sit idle on a server. What is missing is a commissioning editor willing to put Mandy back on air. The pixels are recoverable. The nerve is not.

I will not pretend the past was faultless. Some of the material has dated, and some of it deserved to; a portion of it was simply cruel, and no amount of nostalgia redeems it. But the charge sheet flattens what it should examine. Emery’s grotesques were played with affection rather than contempt, which is the whole distance between comedy and cruelty. And the verdict is not even consistent with itself. The academic Peri Bradley has argued that the camp of a character such as Clarence worked, in its moment, as a liberating force, a kind of visibility smuggled into family entertainment decades before that was safe. The age that files Emery under bigotry cannot account for the gay men who grew up quoting him with delight. The history is more tangled than the sentence passed on it, and tangle is precisely what the humourless cannot abide.

Here the story turns, and here it touches Israel.

The format that made Emery was not homegrown. It was modelled on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, whose writers’ room is the most celebrated in comic history: Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, a roomful of talent that, five years after the Holocaust, was Jewish almost to a man. And the debt to that room is more direct than influence. In 1965, Brooks and Tolkin themselves wrote for Emery, six episodes apiece. The comic engine behind those seventeen million British Saturday nights was, in significant measure, the Jewish American tradition exported across the Atlantic.

That tradition carries a philosophy the present moment has mislaid, and Brooks is its clearest voice. Born Melvin Kaminsky, a combat engineer who cleared landmines in the war while his mother’s people were swallowed by the pogroms and the camps, he spent a career making Hitler ridiculous and was perfectly explicit about why. You cannot beat an orator by climbing onto the soapbox beside him; you bring him down with laughter instead. “The only way to get even with anybody is to ridicule them,” he said. Springtime for Hitler, the musical within The Producers, all goose-stepping chorus girls and a mincing Führer, was an act of war by other means: strip evil of its terrible glamour and put it in a chorus line. Every major studio turned the script down as tasteless. Brooks understood, as the squeamish never do, that the unsafe joke is not a lapse of seriousness but a weapon, a survival mechanism and a moral act at once.

And here is the proof that the instinct opposing him is the same one shelving Emery. Decades after the film became a classic, a staging of The Producers could still draw a picket outside the theatre, placards insisting Hitler was no joke and demanding the show be taken down, on the reasoning that an absolute evil must be met only with reverence and never with a laugh. A Jewish veteran’s revenge on Hitler, recast as an affront to be silenced. That is the tidiness instinct in its purest form: the world must be morally sorted, heroes here and villains there, and nothing, not comedy, not contradiction, may be allowed to blur the line.

That same craving for a clean story is exactly what turns on Israel. It needs a simple villain, so it manufactures one, flattening a real nation, embattled and contradictory and human like every other, into a cartoon. Watch it operate on a campus, where students chant for the elimination of the one Jewish state while assuring themselves they are the soul of compassion. Israel’s own satirists saw it coming: the show Eretz Nehederet skewered the “Columbia Untisemity” encampments, with their slogans for a cause whose champions would gladly silence them, a nation under fire still confident enough to laugh, including at itself. That confidence is the tell. A culture that can mock itself has not surrendered to the commissars, literal or cultural. A culture that cannot is already halfway to their custody.

So let the machines do their work. Let them lift the old tapes into clarity and give Mandy back her colour. But understand that the harder resurrection is not of the footage; it is of the spirit that could broadcast it, the willingness to laugh, in company, including at ourselves, without first checking whether laughter has been approved.

Mandy’s line was always more generous than it sounded. You are awful, but I like you. It holds the fault and the affection in a single breath and refuses to choose between them. That refusal, that comic grace under which a thing may be flawed and beloved at once, is the most humane reflex British comedy ever produced. It is also the reflex at the heart of the tradition that helped write it: the old Jewish art of laughing through tears, of loving an imperfect world too much to varnish it.

It is the thing the age has forgotten how to do. Bring it back.