“Are we the baddies?”, asked the comedy double act Mitchell and Webb in their most famous sketch, in which two uniformed SS officers look one another up and down and arrive at that inescapable conclusion. And lo, it turns out they are, if this week’s news about the supposed offensiveness of the duo’s back catalogue is to be believed.

Their newfound unpalatability made headlines last Monday, when 11 of the pair’s sketches were pulled from the rerelease of That Mitchell and Webb Look on iPlayer to mark its 20th anniversary – a move that led to loud condemnation from the keyboard cavalry in Britain’s never-ending, and never much fun, culture war.

Was the BBC right to expunge the skits? There’s an argument that in this instance, a warning or disclaimer might have been sufficient. The sketches in question variously involve jokes about Jimmy Savile, Robert Webb playing a rude Gandhi (seemingly wearing skin-darkening makeup) and two further scenes in which the comedians wear blackface. In neither sketch are they doing so to depict people of colour, but instead to depict white people (in one scene, re-enactors of historic battles having a go at an African skirmish) who themselves wear blackface. In both, they are alert to their own indelicacy: “Are you sure,” asks Webb repeatedly throughout one, “that this isn’t racist?”

Some have argued that sketches such as these – satires on chauvinism, not........

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