And so the nostalgia machine grinds on, dragging another pop culture corpse back into the light: yes, it’s the return of Ali G. Respeck.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s skull-cap-wearing, “rudebwoy” wankster is staging a comeback with Ali G: Who Iz I?. The new film, premiering next month, is a mockumentary that sees the character starting a family with long-term companion Julie (thinking his approach to fatherhood will be “absent”) and embracing TikTok, all while donning new fake dreads and a rastacap.

It’s taken little time for this revival to enter Britain’s terminal “ARE U OFFENDED, SNOWFLAKE?” culture-war cycle. The Telegraph’s chief film critic, Robbie Collin, wrote that Ali G would save us from comedy’s offence police: “We need a good dose of this sort of puerile needling more than ever.” And now there is a pressure campaign asking cinemas not to screen Baron Cohen’s “racist caricature”, which has accrued more than 46,000 signatures.

The old hits never die. Yet I think this reboot, however tedious, prompts some worthwhile reflection about the changing state of Britain. Since Ali G’s debut in 1998, there has been disagreement over who the joke is on. Erstwhile defenders viewed the character’s absurdity as a reflection of society’s soft bigotry, a satire of white liberal elites’ prejudices.

Ali G’s initial premise was interviews with unsuspecting public figures while posturing as a low-educated wannabe, and lobbing inane questions that reliably........

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