Times Editorial claims Cancel Culture started in 2007
Cancel Culture is a feature of the Tory Culture Wars which have been in progress since 2019. Figures from the right of politics and culture claim they have been cancelled, usually across numerous media outlets. Try getting a piece supporting the general ideas of Jeremy Corbyn in similar outlets and a sense of perspective may dawn. It can be done but its infrequent.
The Times (Editorial 24th January) has claimed that cancel culture dates back to 2007 when the comedian Benny Hill was determined by the BBC to belong to an ‘older, more retrograde England’ and therefore repeats of his programmes are no longer aired. No doubt that can be found easily enough via the interwebs.
Hill most often played a lecherous older man in pursuit of scantily clad young women. As he pursued them he picked up speed accompanied by musical backing. It was perhaps for its time amusing in a way. It was also relentlessly sexist and it wasn’t just fun either. I don’t Hill was advocating sexual harassment and rape but such behaviours were in a way legitimated. Just a bit of ‘fun’. Not really, ever.
Benny Hill may have been funny to at least some 50 years ago. The fact that he was cancelled represents modest progress not to getting rid of humour but to some of the reactionary interests it sometimes appealed go and on occasion still does.
Cancel culture is much, much older than that. Back in 1941, the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams protested that his colleague Alan Bush had been cancelled because of his politics (Bush was a Communist, therefore assumed loyal to the USSR, at a time when that country was allied to Nazi Germany.) Vaughan-Williams withdrew the work the BBC had commissioned from him in protest.
In fact I doubt there has ever been a time in which cancel culture did not exist.
Sadly, instead of protesting, the Left is now joining in with its own form of censorship.
You seem to misremember Benny Hill btw. He didn’t pursue young women, he ran away from them. In the “chase” that finished each programme he was the quarry, not the hunter. Tbh I didn’t find this conceit particularly funny then and I think it would be even less so now; but I wouldn’t seek to stop anyone else watching him. It’s a bit of fun, that’s all. Puritans hate laughter, of course…