Top 11 TV shows & stars cancelled from League of Gentlemen to David Bellamy

Bafta-winning botanist David Bellamy won millions of fans in the 1970s and 80s with TV shows like Don’t Ask Me, Botanic Man, Bellamy On Botany, Bellamy’s Britain and Bellamy’s Backyard Safari. He was warm and honest with a unique rambling style, and he caught viewers’ attention by surfacing from ponds covered in foliage. Bellamy’s enthusiasm and larger-than-life charisma made him a prime target for TV impressionists – Lenny Henry famously parodied his energetic, arm-waving delivery and distinctive voice with the catchphrase “grapple me grape-nuts”.

He even starred in a Ribena ad. But the London-born star’s TV career careened downhill in 2004 when – in the teeth of fashionable opinion – he claimed that man-made global warming was “poppycock”. In 2013, the late nature-loving presenter said, “All of the work dried up after that. I was due to start another series with the BBC but that didn’t go anywhere, and the other side [ITV] didn’t want to know. I was shunned. They didn't want to hear the other side… if you get the idea that people’s children will die because of CO2 they fall for it.”

He professed a strong dislike of wind turbines that ruined the natural beauty of the countryside too. Wind farms were “blots on the landscape,” he said. And “weapons of mass destruction” that harmed wildlife by killing birds and bats. He argued that wind power was intermittent and inefficient, and accurately said that their massive concrete bases never paid back their carbon balance – views that would finally get a TV airing on Landsman. Discovered by BBC in 1967 when he was interviewed about the Torrey Canyon oil spill, David Bellamy wrote and presented more than 400 TV series and shows in Britain, the far east and Australasia, as well as forty books, including his 2002 autobiography, Jolly Green Giant. He also campaigned on green issues, spending his 50th birthday behind bars in Tasmania for opposing an unnecessary dam. In 1997 Bellamy stood as a Referendum party candidate against John Major. He was a man of deep convictions who wasn’t prepared to keep his mouth shut to please TV commissioners and the culturati.

Created and written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft (the geniuses behind Dad’s Army), the long-running situation comedy drew directly on Perry’s own wartime experiences. Set in 1945, during the final months of World War II, it was based around a Royal Artillery concert party stationed in Deolali in Maharashtra, India, and later in Burma. The show was a huge success. It drew massive audiences, peaking at 17 million viewers, and produced a UK Number One hit single (Whispering Grass). Fifty-six episodes were shown on BBC1 from 1974 to 1981. Croft & Perry rated it their favourite and funniest project, and many agreed. It was built around farce, camp musical numbers, recognisable characters and the explosive rants of blustering, booming-voiced Battery Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies). So why did the BBC drop it?

Perry himself said, “It is without doubt the funniest series that David Croft and I wrote. Of course, it is also the show that we’re not allowed to talk about any more.” Whereas Auntie still repeats Dad’s Army, corporate suits view It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum as an embarrassment. Its crime? Alleged racism and homophobia. The cast included Gunner ‘Lofty’ Sugden (Don Estelle), la-di-dah Gunner Graham, cross-dressing gunner Gloria (Melvyn Hayes), Char Wallah Muhammed, Punka Wallah Rumzan and the Indian fixer Rangi Ram who was played by Michael Bates in light tan face make-up.

Sgt Major Williams is not impressed by his men, and dubs these effete theatricals “a load of poofs”. Jimmy Perry said, “People complain the language was homophobic, and it was, but it was exactly how people spoke.” He recalls his own Cockney Sgt Major telling his concert party “no man who puts on make-up and ponces about on a stage is normal”. Race is the bigger bone of convention. Casting a white man as an Indian bearer would be deemed unacceptable today, but there are two significant points of order. Firstly, Michael Bates had been born Jhansi, he spoke fluent Urdu, had been an officer in the Gurkhas and he had served with the Chindits behind Japanese lines in Burma. He was an ideal booking. He was also the only Indian-born actor in the cast as Dino Shafeek was from Bangladesh and Barbar Bhatti was from Pakistan. Secondly and more importantly British Asians didn’t consider the sitcom racist – they called it “our show”. Sanjeev Bhaskar, of Goodness Gracious Me fame, agreed, saying he’d always loved the TV show and pointing out that Rangi Ram was never the butt of the joke – he was “the fixer”, who sorted things out. Melvyn Hayes said the Indian characters “came out on top every time”. He added, “None of the Indian people I’ve spoken to found it offensive. In fact, they thought of it as their sitcom because it was the only time they’d hear Urdu or Hindi spoken on British TV. They thought of it as their show.”

As Perry said, “It was BBC executives who’d never been to India who thought it was racist.” Jimmy, who died ten years ago, added that he was sad that the show he considers his funniest falls foul of modern sensibilities and isn’t shown on TV today. He told the Radio Times, “You might as well be in Stalin’s Russia.”

At the peak of their popularity in the 1980s, The Cannon & Ball Show routinely drew 18 million viewers on Saturday night ITV, rising to 20 million for Christmas specials. The broad comedy show, which ran from 1979 to 1988, was a huge draw. And yet the double act, from Oldham, Lancashire, were suddenly dropped and blackballed from mainstream TV for decades. Their ‘crime’ was to fall out of fashion. A new breed of ITV executives decided the channel needed to shift focus from old-school, blue-collar funny-men and embrace graduate-friendly humour. Tommy Cannon later stated that they were “dismissed without a word” adding that the decision was never fully or clearly explained to them at the time. So great was ITV’s distaste for traditional, crowd-pleasing humour that the network even refused to include the double act in their 70th-anniversary celebrations last year. Bobby sadly died in 2020, but Tommy admitted feeling hurt. He said, “Cannon & Ball gave it everything. We were the wallpaper, not just the furniture.” The comedy legend hit back on social media, tweeting "To be left out of the celebration? That hurts. Not for me—but for Bobby. For the fans. For the legacy. We made millions laugh. That should’ve counted" and added, "I gave ITV decades of laughter, loyalty, and love. To be dismissed without a word – it hurt."

At their peak in the mid-80s Cannon and Ball pulled in huge audiences. Their ten-week summer run at the Blackpool Opera House played to over 300,000 and grossed more than £1 million. Across their full summer and spring tours, they drew over 600,000 live spectators. They were men of the people and the people loved them. In 1988, they put more bum on seats than Bruce Springsteen.

Bobby Ball (born Robert Harper) and Tommy Cannon (Thomas Derbyshire) were launched on TV by LWT’s Michael Grade in 1979. Their show clocked up nine series before the axe fell. After a failed Yorkshire TV sitcom, Bobby had small guest roles in TV dramas like Heartbeat (2005/6) and Casualty (2012), and later played Frank in Not Going Out. The duo continued to perform live, and regularly toured their own gospel show in churches around the country.

Actor Fox is a prime example of someone whose fall from grace was sparked by his opinions. Fox, 48, started his acting career in 2001 and is best-known for playing Detective Sergeant James Hathaway in ITV’s Lewis, a hugely successful spin-off from Inspector Morse; he also portrayed Lord Palmerston in Victoria and appeared in several films. But Fox’s TV acting career was killed dead after he was, in his own words “radicalised by YouTube videos”. The writing was on the wall when he started wearing a Donald Trump MAGA-hat “as a social experiment” in 2019. He told The Times that he believed woke PC culture stifled diversity of opinion. He also said the BBC pedalled propaganda, that he liked multiracialism but hates multiculturalism, and that the green movement had become “a vehicle for extreme Marxist ideologies” – views shared by millions. Fox also targeted the “ultra-woke” Sussexes for their hypocrisy in advocating net zero while riding around on private jets.

So far, so uncontroversial. But he’d said enough for the TV acting roles to dry up.

Fox was signed up by GB News to present a regular Friday night news-and-views slot as an alt-right commentator from November 2022, which was the launchpad for his further demise. He lasted with the channel for just ten months before a bad-taste remark he made on Dan Wootton’s talk show ended that job too. Talking about political journalist Ava Evans, he bafflingly sneered “Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman ever, ever, who wasn’t an incel?” He then added, “Who’d want to shag that?” Evans called the remarks “demeaning… dehumanising… unforgiveable”. Fox and Wootton (and Calvin Robinson who supported them online) all had their contracts terminated. Fox argued that his comments, although crude, were part of a “critical challenge” to mainstream media norms, and claimed that sacking him amounted to GB News abandoning its core promise to champion free speech. Most viewers felt it was just bad manners; a cheap shot. Both apologised but there was no way back. Laurence Fox hasn’t worked on mainstream TV since. Instead, he has devoted himself to politics, with his Reclaim Party, legal battles, and online commentary.

Was the late Kenny cancelled, as Channel 5 argued at length last year? Or was the maverick DJ turned boundary-pushing comedy star just programmed to self-destruct? Everett was regularly dismissed and disciplined by broadcasters over his long career, usually for his misunderstood jokes. His long-list of controversies started in 1970 when Kenny upset his BBC Radio 1 bosses by quipping that Mary Peyton, the wife of Conservative Transport Minister John Peyton, had “probably crammed a fiver into the examiner’s hand.” The adlibbed aside was clearly meant as a gag but po-faced BBC bosses told him to step down with immediate effect that July, deeming the imputation of corruption against a government minister’s family “indefensible”. No wonder he referred to BBC bosses as “mahogany people with mahogany minds”.

Kenny caused another furore when he addressed a Young Conservatives rally during the 1983 general election campaign, coming on stage with giant foam rubber hands (as featured on his mock-evangelical TV character Brother Lee Love). He then shouted slogans like “Let’s bomb Russia!” and “Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!” to loud applause. Kenny later said that this was his reaction to miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, who he saw as “inciting violence” and who looked like “Hitler reborn”. A year later, perhaps for balance, he was sacked by BBC Radio a second time for making a near-the-knuckle joke about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Kenny Everett Television Show ran for five series from 1981 to 1988 on BBC1, full zany energy, camp characters, and suggestive sketches (all done “in the best possible taste”). The skimpy-clad dance troupe Hot Gossip drew complaints for being too racy for early-evening family viewing. Since the last show was broadcast in January 1988, no complete episode has ever been repeated on the BBC. Kenny turned his back on television and sadly died in April 1995 aged 50.

This wonderfully dark comedy series, set in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, followed the lives of various warped and disturbing characters largely played by three of its four writers – Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith. The show, launched in 1999, was a huge success for BBC2. It ran for three series before spawning a film, a stage production and, in 2018, another live show. Memorable characters included Tubbs and Edward Tattsyrup, who ran a local shop for local people, butcher Hilary Briss and his mystery meat, and most striking of all, the sinister, wife-stealing circus ringmaster Papa Lazarou whose look, including white-and-black greasepaint, would cause later culture warriors to accuse the award-winning foursome of channelling the racism of minstrelsy.

The creators defended the look as surreal and scary. Reece Shearsmith later said, “It was horrifying to think that people ever thought that. And we’ve never had any complaints about it as well.” To them, Lazarou was a Child-Catcher-style clown. Critics also argued that cab operator Barbara was ‘transphobic’ and took offence because the village’s name was the real name of adult comedian Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. The black-face allegations meant this brilliant grotesque satire was dropped from Netflix and is no-longer repeated on the BBC, although you can judge it for yourself on iPlayer.

Produced by Thames, Love Thy Neighbour was a rather heavy-handed attempt to defuse racial tension. The sitcom ran from 1972 until January 1976, spanned eight series, lasted for 53 episodes, and achieved an audience high of 21million. Despite its contemporary popularity, it has never been repeated on UK terrestrial television due to many perceiving it as racist. Created and written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, the show had a working-class couple, Eddie and Joan Booth living next door to a better-off black couple Bill and Barbie Reynolds. Eddie (Jack Smethurst) was a socialist shop steward. Most of the episodes involved the men hurling mild racial epithets at each other while their much smarter wives (played by Kate Williams and Nina Baden-Semper) worked to find solutions. Joan generally put Eddie in his place saying “Don’t talk rubbish” and “May God forgive ya.”

EastEnders star Rudolph Walker, who played Tory-voting Bill, said the show was about “a black guy and a white guy being damned stupid.” Vince Powell always rejected accusations that the series used racism to get cheap laughs. He claimed that his intention was to expose and ridicule racism and, as far as he was concerned, this is what it did. Walker agreed saying in 2001, “In nearly every show, the white neighbour was shown to be wrong.” He added in the show’s defence, “I was a black face on the screen, at a time when you didn’t see black faces on the screen… it inspired a lot of young, aspiring actors. The script really had nothing to do with colour.” It was, he said, “of its time” and should be judged accordingly.

The Goodies ran on prime-time for twelve successful years. The BBC has never repeated their series nor released their DVDs themselves. The three stars, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, were friends, flatmates and Footlights colleagues with the Monty Python gang, performing in the same successful student revue. Both were influenced by the Goons, and members of both wrote for That Was the Week That Was and co-starred in forgotten BBC sketch show Broaden Your Mind. Brooke-Taylor co-wrote the Four Yorkshiremen sketch later performed live by the Pythons. The real difference, according to the late Bill Oddie, was The Goodies were more down-to-earth “Our heroes were Buster Keaton and Tom & Jerry.”

Their inventive series was half sitcom, half sketch show, full of slapstick and speeded-up segments. They were also subversive enough to sneak in satire, like their sex-education spoof, How to Make Babies By Doing Dirty Things, which sent up moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse via the character Mrs. Desiree Carthorse (Beryl Reid). Some of their satire would not play today. They did a minstrel spoof in which Martin Luther King says, “I have a dream about a world where minstrels will be all sorts of colours, not just black and white.” Bill Oddie said, “If someone thinks that’s un-PC, then they really are stupid.”

Their comedic offences include Graham Garden doing a Muhammad Ali boxing routine that evolves into an Al Jolson-style blackface impression during their Ecky-Thump episode, Kung Fu Capers. This might be considered racially insensitive today but was clearly framed as a comic absurdity rather than being bigoted or malicious. The episode was screened in 1975 when the BBC was still screening The Black & White Minstrel Show (which ran for 20 years until 1978). By the standards of its time, it was not remotely racist. Another episode tackled South Africa, where Oddie fell victim to the “apart-height” regime, the pianos had all the white keys down one end and the black keys down the other, and a racist Boer smashed his sunglasses for making people look darker. The word “nig-nog” was used, but said Garden, “If you put offensive words into the mouth of a villain, is that still offensive or is that making a point? I think at the time we were using language which was pretty well current, but would not be current anymore.” It’s hard to see why these examples would have caused their cancellation when Python also blacked-up for sketches. Especially when they involved just two episodes out of 76. Why not show the other 74? The Goodies were a huge part of 70s culture. They were the fifth highest-grossing pop act of 1975 with Top Ten hits like The Funky Gibbon and The Inbetweenies. Sadly Black Pudding Bertha (The Queen of Northern Soul) peaked at 19. They attracted audience highs of 15 million (more than triple Python’s TV pull), won multiple awards include two Silver Roses of Montreux and Spielberg suggested a film collaboration. So what went wrong? The Goodies themselves put their lack of respect down to their own lack of coolness. Python were edgy, parents didn’t temd to like then, but said Oddie, “I’m willing to bet that most heads of BBC2 down the years were Python fans who regarded The Goodies as a kids’ programme. And they were not going to show us because they were too hip.” Eight series were screened on the BBC, before ITV bought it for one run in 1981. The BBC has been reluctant to screen any repeat episodes ever since, except for rare anniversary events.

His career started on ITV after winning the talent show New Faces, but stand-up comedian Jim Davidson became the new face of BBC1 entertainment in the 90s. After making a hit of snooker-loopy TV quiz Big Break, Davidson took over the mantle of presenting the Corporation’s biggest Saturday night show, The Generation Game, in 1995. Both hit formats ran for seven years with Jim’s Gen Game achieving audience highs of up to 10 million. He had another series of both shows commissioned for 2023 but the BBC cancelled them. “They gave me a £1million in compensation and said, ‘Please don’t tell anybody’,” Jim recalls. Worse, he claims they then “cut me out of Generation Game history” and refused to sell his episodes to air on his self-powered Ustreme subscription channel.

Jim adamantly put the blame on Political Correctness, saying, “I don’t like it when a couple of people at the top, the Highgate elite, decide what people can see”. A BBC insider blamed his demise on controversial material and shifting public taste. Yet there were no near-the-knuckle jokes on either show – Davidson knew how to work clean as well as dirty. He said, “Since Bernard Manning died, I’m the bad guy; I’m ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobic’ etc – that’s what people who haven’t seen me live think.”

In the 80s, Jim did do black voices in his stand-up, but he maintained that they were affectionately based on an old black schoolmate at St Austen’s School in Charlton, London, SE7. In the noughties, he wrote a play Stand Up and Be Counted which balances old-hat prejudices with the views of an up-and-coming black comedian. Homophobia? Jim’s dresser was gay and the star paid for his private medical care without talking about it to the press. His rows with his last BBC producer weren’t primarily about her gender but about the BBC cutting his budget so he couldn’t make the show as funny as it could have been.

His darkest hour came when he lost work for eight months in 2013 which he spent under police investigation for Operation Yewtree. The charges were ultimately dropped and he went on win Celebrity Big Brother. Davidson is a complicated man, and he admits he is a misogynist, but he is also rated as a first-class comedian, with a range stretching from gag delivery to impressions via anecdotes and sight gags. Millions love him and yet it is hard not to conclude that he is excluded from mainstream screens for historic thought-crimes such as supporting Margaret Thatcher and performing for British troops around the globe.

Spike Milligan’s anarchic humour revolutionised British comedy. Chaotic and gloriously silly, his BBC hit radio series The Goon Show was radical and side-splitting, an inspired splash of character-driven colour in grey and depressing fifties Britain. It ran from 1951 to January 1960. Catchwords and meaningless phrases, like “He’s fallen in the water!”, hooked a generation. The Goons, also starring Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, included a host of distinctive and inspirational characters like Major Bloodnock, Bluebottle, Neddy Seagoon and Eccles, all dreamt up by Milligan. The Goons, and Spike’s equally manic 60s TV series The World of Beachcomber and the Q series, led the way to Beyond The Fringe and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and in turn Vic & Bob, Eddie Izzard, The League Of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh. But the lid was shut on Spike’s BBC TV career after the 1982 one-off There’s A Lot Of It About, which followed the final Q series, 1980’s Q9. He recorded two TV specials on ITV – The Last Laugh Before TV-AM (1985) and An Evening with Spike Milligan (1996) and that was it. Why?

Jazz musician and comic genius Spike was always an uneasy fit with the BBC, even at the start. Spike’s letters to and from the BBC, plus internal memos, show that, in his words, he “had to fight like mad and people didn’t like me for it. I had to bang and rage and crash... it drove me mad in the process.” His enemy were the officer class, who working-class Milligan had crossed swords with during the war. BBC execs hated chippy Spike’s rebelliousness, and the fact that most establishment characters in The Goon Show were corrupt, self-serving or cowardly. Some BBC managers tried to get the show cancelled even as its radio audience soared to three million by the end of series two. In response, Milligan wrote an entire episode parodying Orwell’s 1984, where Big Brother became the Big Brother Corporation…

BBC execs also hated him for sending up the government and the Royals (although the then Prince Charles was one of the show’s biggest fans). But in the end Spike gave them the ammo to close him down. He was first cancelled in 1969 when ITV pulled the Johnny Speight sitcom Curry & Chips off air. The series was conceived by Spike, who played an Irish Pakistani, and was designed to confront bigotry. Speight later said, “It was the [white] English who were made to look bigoted in the show but the people at the ITA [Independent Television Authority) couldn’t understand that…The ITA made LWT take it off, saying it was racist.” Milligan defended his use of controversial language in interviews, claiming that repeating or using slurs was a method to strip them of their power.

As well as his chippy attitude to class, Spike became a committed campaigner on issues close to his heart. He was against abortion, vivisection, factory farming and needless noise. But finding humour in race was the real stickler. His mid-70s BBC1 sitcom The Melting Pot, co-written with Neil Shand, was pulled after the pilot; seven episodes were made but never shown. Spike’s blend of anarchy and surrealism even caused problems on The Muppet Show when he packed in racial stereotypes, foreigner gags, and a quick Sieg-heil salute. Sam the Eagle tells Milligan, “Sir, you are a disgrace to England,” before Spike’s trousers fall down to reveal a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts. In the closing musical number, Spike played a fur-hatted Russian, a bucktoothed Asian, and fez-spotting Arab. When Disney acquired the series, this was the only episode they scrapped. Mocking Nazis was fairly common on TV back then, but for Disney it was a goose-step too far.

The Benny Hill Show was a huge success for Thames TV. It was watched by 21.63 million viewers at its height in 1971 and was sold to 100 countries. Yet the show was axed in 1989 after a few people, most prominently alternative comedian Ben Elton, accused the show of being sexist. Professor’s son Ben claimed that Hill’s closing scene, where he chased scantily-clad women through a park, normalised sexual assault. To Thames TV bosses, that was enough. Benny was called in and sacked in a humiliating ten-minute interview. Yet was it fair?

Had Ben Elton watched any Benny Hill shows in full, he would have seen that the chased women always turned the scene around and ended up pursuing Benny. Hill lampooned sexism. His male characters were always the targets for the jokes; the men were depicted as inadequate, bumbling fools. The women always had the upper hand. I would argue that Benny was the first victim of comedy cancel culture, that his fall was symbolic of a hypocritical, middle-class graduate take-over of television that never came close to equalling the appeal of stars such as Morecambe & Wise, Benny and Freddie Starr. Thames TV cut off their nose to spoil their face.

While Ben Elton faced his own backlash – attacked by radical comics like Mark Steel and Stewart Lee – Benny remains loved the world over, especially in the USA where his admirers include and included Clint Eastwood, Snoop Dog, Busta Rhymes and the late Michael Jackson.