When the BBC television programme The Black and White Minstrel Show breathed its last one evening in 1978 after a whopping 20 years, I don’t think many people were that cut up about it. Except, of course, the entertainers involved, who included a young Lenny Henry. When I see Sir Lenworth CBE now talking about reparations, I wonder how much of it is him trying to compensate for appearing in this show. Don’t worry, Len. You were married to Dawn French for 25 years – you’ve served the time.

The Black and White Minstrel Show had been a phenomenon, spawning huge tours and hit albums, with an audience of 20million viewers at its peak – but the 1980s were almost here, and it was obvious to anyone half-sentient how offensive it was. For those of you too young to remember the show, it comprised white male singers wearing ‘blackface’ make-up, singing songs to attractive white women. Even as a child I sensed there was something off about it, so it’s surprising that they kept it going so long. But then the BBC is always rather slow on the uptake, which may be something to do with its lumbering, bloated size.

When it does see the light, however, it will invariably be intent on shining the torch directly into the eyes of the poor paying public and insisting that it’s all their fault before proceeding with a full-on scolding. Thus, in 2023, the BBC broadcast a documentary featuring David Olusoga and David Harewood informing us of the evils of ‘blackface’ and using The Black and White Minstrel Show to illustrate this – as if the decision to broadcast this abomination had been taken by hoi polloi rather than the posh white men who ran the BBC for all those years.

Long before ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ was a song by Taylor Swift, there was a similarly named psychological game, identified by Eric Berne in his brilliant pop-psychology book, Games People Play, in which a person throws the blame for a bad action on to another, even to the point of feeling genuine anger at them. Auntie can run as many cringingly cosy adverts as it likes telling us that it’s ‘our’ BBC, but this has very much been the attitude of the state-sanctioned broadcaster to its tributaries: pay up and shut up – and when it goes wrong, it was all your fault in the first place.

You’d think that, having so conclusively backed a bad idea, for so long and so late, in the shape of blackface, the BBC might have swerved such shenanigans thereafter. But I guess that the taste for mocking a section of the Beeb’s compatriots who hadn’t been to a decent public school was strong in the corporation. So ‘womanface’ replaced blackface as the drag of choice.

It has now emerged that the BBC has cancelled RuPaul’s Drag Race UK after eight series due to ‘significant financial pressures’. According to the BBC website, after starting in 2019, ‘Drag Race UK brought British drag into mainstream entertainment in the UK, and made household names of drag performers such as La Voix, Danny Beard and Tia Kofi.’ (Never heard of ‘em.)

I’m pleasantly surprised that this chop has happened, as the BBC has been unhealthily obsessed with drag queens over the past few years. Every ‘talent’, cookery and panel show must boast a bloke blind with sparkling eyeshadow; they’re all over Celebrity Mastermind, The Weakest Link, The One Show and Comic Relief (which actually sounds like a drag-queen name – once you look at life in their ceaselessly, and oddly joyless, smutty manner, everything seems like a drag-queen name. I can’t go past my local butcher without making a mental note to avoid Crackling & Stuffing.) As Andy Jones (who worked for the BBC himself) noted starkly in the Spectator earlier this year: ‘And, of course, “because of the unique way the BBC is funded”, the BBC News site also features every crumb of drag news from “Wiltshire locals dress in drag for calendar” to “Drag queens impacted by cost-of-living crisis.” The site ran around 20 separate online stories about the death of drag queen “The Vivienne”.’

BBC News even has a dedicated written section for the creatures – which can often run more stories than the boring old women’s section. BBC News’ top story on International Women’s Day one year was Dylan Mulvaney’s autobiography. Drag queens even have their own alleged sitcom Smoggie Queens, which has been commissioned by the BBC for a third series. I’ll stop here, though there’s masses more, because I’m starting to feel a tiny bit queasy. I’ll just say that it’s amazing there hasn’t been a drag queen reading the BBC News yet, hoiking up her false bosom while recounting some terrible atrocity.

This isn’t a bit of a giggle or pushing the boundaries or ‘being kind’. Drag is womanface, and it’s every bit as bad as blackface. That we don’t see it as such – and that women are among those who cheer these misogynist clowns on – speaks volumes about how we still see sexism as the ‘Yes, but…’ of prejudice, not really serious enough to be up there with racism. It’s ironic that a generation of young, liberal women have proudly freed themselves from being compliant to putative male partners of their own age (see that recent New Statesman poll that found that while only 35 per cent of women under 25 hold a favourable view of men, men from the same cohort hold a 72 per cent favourable view of women), but are fine with being adoring audiences and simpering punchlines for men who want only to mock them. They are accessories and doormats, there to make men dressed as women look acceptable – even if they call themselves names like Cheryl Hole and A’Whora and talk about ‘being fishy’ when they compliment one of their kind for ‘passing’ as a woman. There are drag queens who squirt ‘milk’ out of their fake breasts and drag queens who pretend to have ‘periods’ all over the stage. Is that just a bit of fun, too? But for the kind of woman who is deeply dreary and wants to look edgy, and who has usefully internalised her own misogyny, nothing is too low to get a ‘You go, gurrrl!’.

Some women will even involve their own baffled children in ‘Baby Drag Bingo’ or ‘Drag Queen Story Time’. In 2023, the truly vile-sounding ‘CabaBabaRave’ took place, featuring drag queens in thongs and bondage gear gurning at bewildered babies – it was organised by two women. Such thoroughly castrated females exist only as accessories to befrocked men who, the idiots frequently reassure them, make ‘a better woman than I do!’. In a piece calling the cancellation of Drag Race UK ‘sickening’, the Guardian smugged: ‘A contestant in season one even had a girlfriend at the time – and if that’s not inclusion, what is?’ More fool her. Talk about a female eunuch. Talk about a trans- / handmaid.

Even as a little girl, I knew that blackface was wrong. How stupid must grown women be, how complicit in the contempt which the BBC has been so flagrant in displaying towards them, not to recognise the same thing about womanface?