Former Hey Hey It’s Saturday star John Blackman has responded to claims the show was racist towards guests on the controversial show.
Responding to musician Kamahl’s admission he felt “humiliated” by a number of racist remarks and shocking skits on the variety show, Blackman said he would have “desisted” had Kamahl spoken up at the time, the Daily Mail reports.
Posting to Facebook, while he admitted he “cringes” looking back at some of the episodes, Blackman also suggested the star should have let it go by now.
“Goodness me Kamahl, 37 years and you’re still “humiliated”,” he wrote in response to comments the Malaysian-born entertainer made in an interview with The Guardian.
It comes after fellow former Hey Hey cast member Daryl Somers caused outrage when he said the show’s content wouldn’t survive in today’s “political correctness and cancel culture” climate, prompting the response from Kamahl, who was regularly subjected to jokes about his skin colour on the show.
RELATED: Daryl Somers blackface video resurfaces
Asked whether he thought Hey Hey could return in light of the controversial remarks by Somers, 86-year-old Order of Australian member Kamahl recalled “a number of instances where I felt humiliated”.
He added that he didn’t want to raise any objections at the time, and would instead just smile and “pretend everything was OK”.
This week, a collection of shocking Hey Hey clips involving Kamahl was shared on social media, including blackface segments impersonating the musician, and a skit which saw Kamahl’s face covered with white powder, to which Blackman joked off-screen: “You’re a real white man now Kamahl, you know that?”
RELATED: Jimmy Fallon responds to blackface sketch controversy
Another gag saw the lighting department asking Kamahl to smile so “we can see him”.
“Friends of mine in America saw that and to this day they can’t believe that somebody would treat an artist with that amount of disrespect,” Kamahl explained of the blackface impersonations.
Responding to the resurfaced clips and Kamahl’s comments, Blackman wrote on Facebook: “You knew where my booth was!
“If you felt so aggrieved by my “quip” you should have had marched up to it, had a quiet word in my ear and I would have desisted from making any further ”racist” remarks forever.”
He added: “Keep in mind, we were all performing in less-enlightened (unintended pun) times back in the day and, when I look back over my career on HHIS (via YouTube), I sometimes cringe at what we got away with – but none of it with any intended malice.”
Last week, Daryl Somers said it was a “shame” television shows can’t “get away with half the stuff you could on Hey Hey.”
“You probably could not get away with half the stuff you could on Hey Hey now because of the political correctness and the cancel culture,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“It is a shame because showbiz does not get much of a chance.”
Last year, people were reminded of the show’s controversial moments when a video of Somers performing in blackface circulated online.
The clip shows Somers singing Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World alongside New Zealand jazz singer Ricky May.
It was part of a tribute package that aired on the show in 1988 after May’s death, and it is still available to view on the show’s YouTube page.
Hey Hey It’s Saturday infamously made headlines again in 2009 when five men performed in blackface during the Red Faces segment in a Hey Hey Reunion Special.
The men, who were pretending to be the Jackson Five, received a score of zero from guest judge Harry Connick Jr who said he was offended by the performance.
Somers apologised to the singer at the end of the show, saying: “I think we may have offended you with that act and I deeply apologise on behalf of all of us – because I know that to your countrymen, that’s an insult to have a blackface routine like that on the show, so I do apologise to you.”
Connick Jr said he would not have appeared on the show had he known about the performance.
“I know it was done humorously, but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons that when we see something like that we take it really to heart,” he said.
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2021-03-28 08:04:07Z
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