Reception
Critics viewed the casting of the white actor Michael Bates as the Indian bearer Rangi Ram as an example of blackface, a perception that may have contributed to the programme being infrequently repeated on British television. The show's producers had been very averse to the idea of casting a white actor to play one of the Indian characters, but were forced to relent owing to the lack of high-profile Indian actors available at the time. Since the Anglo-Indian Bates, a popular actor of the day, was born in India and spoke Hindi before learning English, he was cast in the role as a trade-off between giving the series greater credibility and giving the character a degree of Indian authenticity.
Read more about this topic: It Ain't Half Hot Mum
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)