Netflix has removed a pair of older British comedies “Little Britain” and “Come Fly With Me” over their use of blackface, the streaming service confirmed.
Both series, from Matt Lucas and David Walliams, were only available to Netflix’s U.K. subscribers.
“Little Britain,” a sketch comedy series, aired from 2003-07 on the BBC, while the mockumentary “Come Fly With Me” debuted in 2010. Both series saw Lucas and Walliams play characters from different ethnic backgrounds. The decision to pull the two comes after two weeks of protests against police brutality and racism sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day.
Lucas had previously expressed regret over the show in a 2017 interview.
“I wouldn’t play black characters. Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now,” Lucas told “The Big Issue” magazine. “It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now. Society has moved on a lot since then, and my own views have evolved. There was no bad intent there – the only thing you could accuse us of was greed. We just wanted to show off about what a diverse bunch of people we could play. Now I think it’s lazy for white people to get a laugh just by playing black characters.”
Daily mail was first to report on the two series being pulled.