Mr Pastry Time

Wonder if anyone can help please. I am looking for recordings of the Black & White Minstrel Show for my dad. If anyone can help me it would be great.
Many thanks for reading.

Mr Pastry Time

I now have two shows. Might anyone have any other swaps?

Moor Larkin

I was amazed to read, as an aside, in an old TV magazine, that the glorious Hattie 'invented' this Institutional Racism...........

Wouldn't have thought the lovely woman would have such an evil psyche would you............: . I think she created them for a theatre revue and then the concept transferred to television.

I was amused, whilst watching the Danger Man episode, Sting in the Tail, last night, to notice that a female character had a favourite 'doll'. It was a fellow-traveller of the Minstrels.... the dread Golliw*g. Thankfully Danger Man was filmed in grey and buff so no colour offence could be taken........

[code]http://www.flickr.com/photos/29487363@N02/sets/72157606700675506/code]

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

I don't see what Hattie Jacques has got to do with "inventing" the minstrels. The minstrel tradition goes right back to 19th century America. You can see recreations of it in Jolson films like "Swanee River" (purportedly based on the life of Stephen Foster) and "Mammy." It's not even a recent invention to have the "White" minstrels in the form of leggy ladies as the minstrel-show aboard ship in Eddie Cantor's "Kid Millions" (1934) shows.
I doubt whether anybody involved in the Black and White Minstrel Show believed that what they were doing was at all racist. Certainly Cantor was the least racist of men and often spoke up (when it wasn't "popular" to do so) on, for instance, the iniquity suffered by black artists who, having been lauded on stage were then expected to enter their lodgings by a back entrance like a tradesman "with the applause still ringing in their ears."

Moor Larkin

I'll dig out the magazine (I think it was a Fifties TV Mirror) and quote it for you..

"If racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs or practices, that institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racial intentions."
The Commission for Racial Equality

So if someone thinks they are offended, an offence is committed. Cool isn't it?...

[code]http://www.flickr.com/photos/29487363@N02/sets/72157606700675506/code]

Steve Crook

I find that statement offensive and I also find it offensive the way that an institution like that can try to group people into such articial categories.

Can I sue them for institutional racism? :

Steve

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

"If racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs or practices, that institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racial intentions."
The Commission for Racial Equality

([/quote]

As Ken Dodd has been known to say about a piece of gobbledygook he doesn't really understand, "They can't touch you for it.".....except, in this case, they probably can.

shuttleworth

I am also looking for any episodes.
If anyone can please help get in touch

Moor Larkin

Found the magazine. It was from June 1954. At the bottom of page 5 there is a photo headlined
Black-faced Minstrels for TV
and the byline reads:
"In place of "Fast and Loose" tonight (Wednesday), postponed until Bob Monkhouse's return to health, we are to have a minstrel show. In it will be Hattie Jacques, who originally produced the show at the Players' Theatre, London"

Anyhow, I note it says a minstrel show not the minstrel show.....

The Mitchell Minstrels became the famous ones of course. I noticed that, according to this webpage:
The Black and White Minstrel Show
that show included the dancing group "The Television Toppers". The Toppers were the dancing girls that Richard Todd was watching when he dreamed up the targetting system in The Dambusters, which was also the film that gave Patrick McGoohan his first speaking role in movies........

[code]http://www.flickr.com/photos/29487363@N02/sets/72157606700675506/code]

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

Thanks for that ML. Producing a show isn't the same as inventing it, though.
"The term Jim Crow is believed to have originated around 1830 when a white, minstrel show performer, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, blackened his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork and danced a ridiculous jig while singing the lyrics to the song, "Jump Jim Crow." Rice created this character after seeing (while traveling in the South) a crippled, elderly black man (or some say a young black boy) dancing and singing a song ending with these chorus words:

"Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."
Some historians believe that a Mr. Crow owned the slave who inspired Rice's act--thus the reason for the Jim Crow term in the lyrics. In any case, Rice incorporated the skit into his minstrel act, and by the 1850s the "Jim Crow" character had become a standard part of the minstrel show scene in America. On the eve of the Civil War, the Jim Crow idea was one of many stereotypical images of black inferiority in the popular culture of the day.."

is a passage I found on the web showing that the minstrel show was in existence long before loveable Hattie's dad was a twinkle in his daddy's eye.

I understand that many of the B and W minstrel shows survive in the BBC's archives, but the chances of any of them being issued commercially or even re-broadcast are, I would have thought, practically non-existent.

Freddy

To add to this there was a Captain Hugh Crow who commanded the last slave-ship that sailed out of the port of Liverpool. He started in the slave trade in the 1790s. By all accounts (often his own) he was a popular captain and treated his slaves well, compared to other ships, which of course was to his financial advantage, the more healthy slaves he delivered the more money and extra bounty he got from the ship owners. He once risked his life to save slaves from a fire in the ship's hold. He must have had a good reputation amongst the slaves .

Below is an extract from 'The History of the Privateers and Slave Trade of Liverpool' by Gomer Williams, written in 1897.

Crow was very severe on the abolitionists or as he called them 'pretenders to humanity' and at the age of 43 he retired after having made a competent fortune. A Manxman by birth he retired to the Isle of Man but finding life too monotonous returned to Liverpool where he gathered with others involved in the Africa trade to talk of the past. He then moved to Preston where he wrote his memoirs. He died in 1829 at the age of 64.

Regards

Freddy

David Brent

No one really cared when Michael Jackson "whitened" up his face.:

Dave.

Steve Crook

I think you'll find that they did. There were a lot of comments about him selling out and betraying his roots. But they could have been lost in the rest of the publicity that always surrounds him.

Steve

Mr Pastry Time

At the end of the day The B&W Minstrel show was just a family entertainment show, and family entertainment is hard to find these days on TV. My Mum & Dad used to watch it for the great music and you could hear every word of the songs. As a family it was good viewing for us and did not upset us or my friends from school who were mixed skin tones as well. Dad went on a TV show some time ago to talk about it being removed from TV and it was clear from what the the network said they were more scared than anything. What a world.....

I do have two shows on DVD to swap for others if anyone can help and shortly hope to have my Dads interview if all goes well for those who are interested.

A week or so ago Dad, now 88 came 300 miles to have a screening of the B&W Minstrels show which is available for viewing at The Bradford TV Museum. A long way for a pensioner. The funny part is that when we sat watching it others also joined us towards the end including a very nice Asian family. There may still be hope for the human race yet but TV I fear has had it.

tvden

Hi all I am also looking for any episodes of this show if you can help please get in touch many thanks