From the Observer archive 25 February 1968: Farewell Alf Garnett, we all knew you

It seems to be impossible for intellectuals to experience enthusiasm for an artist of popular culture without trying to justify it by social analysis and historical placing. I'm not attacking this tendency. It has its negative side, of course. We like it, therefore if we are to avoid being dismissed as insensitive vulgarians, we must show what it is that makes it intellectually respectable for us to do so. But there is also a real wish to communicate the virtues of something which may otherwise be overlooked, and to celebrate with almost pathetic gratitude a proof that, despite the cynical and contemptible belief that any old rubbish will do for Them, so long as it offends nobody and gets high ratings, there is still an area where popular taste and demonstrable quality coincide.

I feel obliged to make some comment on the almost inevitable shout-up at Alf Garnett's wake. This is a reluctant duty. Only a week or two back, I wrote that, much as I admired the programme, I felt that there was very little new to say about it, and the same is already true in relation to its obituaries. In particular Karl Miller, editor of that unlikely phoenix among the periodicals, the Listener, managed to compress into one column an analysis of all the doubts raised, all the issues involved, and an unsentimental appraisal of all the virtues which had so triumphantly justified the by now ironically named series. Yet I feel it would be inexcusable to opt out on the grounds of possible repetition. Till Death Us Do Part was among the small handful of programmes which I believe justify TV as a medium.

As Miller wrote, it was ambiguous, one of the proofs of artistic authenticity. It managed, and this is another basic test, to contain general and universal truths within a particularised and temporal shell. By creating Alf Garnett and his wife, Johnny Speight has added two figures to the small pantheon of immortal comic monsters, the Pere and Mere Ubu of the Welfare State, and in time this will appear to have been his great achievement.

But it has had a more didactic function. He probed, with an admirable contempt for our sensibilities, into the social sores and abscesses which we have tried to ignore in the vain hope that they might cure themselves. He is, in fact, a moralist, and like all true moralists, became the object of hatred and denigration to those who confuse morality with "good taste". Well, now his enemies would appear to have won.

In fairness, the corporation has acted in the past with surprising leniency. Paternalistic the BBC may be, but it is a comparatively permissive father, and the idea that this programme might have ever seen the light of day under the aegis of one of the commercial companies is clearly absurd. Now, of course, there is talk of them accepting it and so, up to its present limits, they might; but considering that Speight claims that censorship lies behind the rift, it would prove. I should have thought, a very temporary solution. The commercial companies will tolerate the the previously taboo after it has been proved acceptable, but it is the BBC which is prepared to chance its arm.

It would be interesting to see what cuts Speight objected to. The official explanation is that his story is sour grapes and that the series is to be terminated because they feel he has written himself out. There may be some basis for this argument; some of the more recent episodes were disappointing, but then so were some of the very earliest.

Equally, right up to the end, there have been sustained passages of hilarious invention, and while Speight felt he had more to say I feel he should have been given the benefit of the doubt. After all, there are plenty of old TV warhorses limping along week after week, series after series, in a far more "exhausted" state than Till Death.

Of all the reactions to the news, the one I found most encouraging was an explosion of rage from the headmaster of my son's comprehensive. He thought it was monstrous that they were taking it off. I asked him why, because he enjoyed it so much? Not that, although he did, but because of his pupils. It had done more in his view to break down public prejudice, to educate in the true sense, than any other programme.

This is an edited extract. Till Death Us Do Part was later brought back by the BBC, and continued until 1975