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This 80s sitcom is a terrifying premonition of Britain under Jeremy Corbyn


A reader alerts Little Atoms to this scary vision of Corbyn's Britain*/not very funny 80s sitcom.

Aired in 1986, Comrade Dad was set in a future Britain (USSRGB) which had been taken over by the Russians and was now run by the Communist Party undfer its glorious leader, VS Hoskins.

The title character, played by the recently deceased George Cole, is very enthusiastic about the regime: the other characters less so.

The first episode also featured the young Roger Lloyd Pack as a dashing blackmarketeer, who gives Comrade Dad's son a chicken. 

Ironically, the sitcom imagines the Soviet takeover to happen in June 1989, the very month Solidarity won elections in Poland, one of the most important events in the demise of Communism in Europe.

It's worth a watch, if not really for the LOLs (there are some quite dark gags about life under totalitarianism), then at least as a TERRIFYING WARNING**/historical curio.

*We fully realise that any criticism of Jeremy Corbyn is a MCCARTHYITE SMEAR and that it is Corbyn's opponents who are the real Stalinists etc etc. We are obviously joking.

**Still joking. Christ, calm down.

Padraig Reidy is the editor of Little Atoms. He is Director of Editorial at 89up and has written and ghostwritten for The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Observer, The Irish Times, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Sun, and The Irish Post.