I was talking to someone about Canadian cheese yesterday and sent her a video of an old UK advert which referenced the delicious cheesy comestible.
The excellent actress Maureen Lipman in the role of Beattie Bellman (a play on the telephone company British Telecom aka BT) a funny Jewish mumma and her interaction with family, friends and the world. Here she is on the telephone discussing taking her son a sandwich while he works late.
These ran for several years late 80s early 90s. They featured established actors (the lovely Bernard Bresslaw was Dolly’s husband) and were heartwarming and very funny
2025 – Maureen Lipman is now a serious and moving supporter of Israel; about Miriam Margolyes who played her ‘friend’ Dolly the least said the better, her good performance as Mother Mildred in Call the Midwife notwithstanding.
I then remembered another comedy of the early 90s, So Haunt Me! That starred another actress, Miriam Karlin, also Jewish, playing a stereotypical and dead Jewish mumma, who haunts her old home terrorising new tenants. Until a nice couple with children move in;
the wife and son can see her but the husband and daughter can’t.
As an aside the same theme of a family in a haunted house, with only one member able to see the ghost isn’t unique but was used again in the only recent TV comedy that can be called funny, although I accept that is only my subjective opinion. That is, was, Ghosts (BBC 2029-2023). A young woman inherits Button Hall, a crumbling historic house. Only she can see the numerous ghosts. Being relatively modern the couple are mixed race, wife white, husband (a sweetheart) is black. The ghosts include a young black woman whose back story is based on the real Dido Belle. The husband’s large family gives actors of colour lots of work.
Then bit by bit, programme by programme, with the notable exception of Friday Night Dinner (Channel 4 2011 – 2020) we have gone from Jewish humour as a much loved feature of TV and society to Jews being murdered in Manchester and under serious threat of murder elsewhere. Jews attacked or threatened on the streets anywhere they dare to live.
Jews having to be careful not to wear a kippot or a star of David openly or only in certain places.
Contemplating moving abroad because they are not safe in my home.
I didn’t think I’d see this. I thought the hatred of Hitler and the newsreel rantings of Oswald Mosley were just that. History, and soon to be as ancient history as the persecutions of the Thirty Years War. Or the machinations of the Witchfinder General.
It is a great sorrow how wrong I was. And in a period as short as not my lifetime, but that of my child.
2 Responses
Ridding the nation of Islam would help a lot.
Nobody will not be astonished by the pace of change since the massacre, but we cannot claim to be altogether surprised by events . For years, antisemitism has been a staple at fashionable dinner tables in North London, while Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller (both banned from entering the UK by Theresa May as Home Secretary) and many others, including Rebecca here, have been warning about the dangers from Islam.
Does Trump get it? We hope so, but it’s a Gordian knot and may require an Alexandrian solution.