Hulu Pulls ‘Little Britain’ From Streaming Over Blackface Sketches

Hulu has removed Little Britain from its content library after the show featured blackface in some sketches. The move comes after Netflix and Britbox both pulled Little Britain from their streaming libraries, according to the BBC.

A Hulu rep confirmed to Decider that the sketch comedy is no longer available to stream on their platform and that the show has been taken down.

The Matt Lucas and David Walliams series was officially pulled from BritBox and iPlayer today, and Netflix removed it on Friday. While Little Britain was never available to stream on Netflix in the U.S., American viewers could stream the series on Hulu, which featured Little Britain up until earlier today.

Netflix and BritBox have also removed Come Fly With Me, an airport mockumentary Lucas and Walliams released in 2010.

Little Britain first premiered in 2003. The show features multiple characters of different racial backgrounds, all played by Lucas and Walliams, who are both white. Using full blackface makeup, Walliams plays a Black woman named Desiree DeVere in Little Britain, while in Come Fly With Me, Lucas acts as an airline worker named Taaj and a Black woman named Precious Little, who he plays in full blackface, according to Deadline.

 Lucas seemed to express regret in the past over the Black characters he’d played on Little Britain. In an interview with Big Issue magazine in 2017, he told the outlet that he would change the way he created the series.

“I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now,” he said. “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.”

Netflix was previously in talks with Lucas and Walliams to revive the show earlier this year.