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.