“BOYS!” The shout was the rarest of commands, in our household. It wasn’t dinner time. None of us had committed any sort of transgression. No. This was a joyous shout, a raised voice eliciting expectation, excitement. As we tumbled downstairs and poured into the lounge, Saturday evening TV would be in full flow.

My parents would be watching and guffawing at Mind Your Language. For those too young to remember, this late-1970s ITV comedy series was set in the English As A Foreign Language class.

My brothers and I would sit in obedient discomfort while prime-time television drew the more stereotypical of stereotypes about every nation under the sun. The saucy Scandinavian woman; the hirsute and incomprehensible Greek fella. And the wobbly-headed, docile, generic Indian child of Empire.

Our discomfort was matched only by our parents’ glee. They loved this. We loathed it.

Years later I finally understood their exuberance. Although the characters were offensive, two-dimensional parodies of who we were, in those days they were the only brown faces on the telly.

Same goes for Love Thy Neighbour and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. But there was a single programme that tackled race and bigotry in a very different way: the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. While the brown man was the butt of the jokes, the pastiche around which the fully formed white characters waltzed, Alf Garnett was the focus of the viewers’ ridicule.

Johnny Speight’s brilliant writing collided with the sandpaper sincerely of Warren Mitchell’s realisation of Alf, and the series marked the changing times between the late 1960s into the 1970s.

The Alf Garnett character was a blue-collar Tory, a racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-semitic misathrope, prepared to blame the world for his problems. He was a massive hit with the British viewing public. And while Speight defended his character as epitomising all that ought to be loathed, many viewers tuned in to agree with Alf. (The fact that Mitchell himself was a Jew was a detail lost on this constituency).

I was always the first to defend the BBC and the writer. Satire is about intent; we cannot control how the audience decode the wrong-headed opinions of a comedy character, can we? Similarly, if some don’t see the brilliant comedy parody of Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, are we to stop all forms of satire?

Alf was very much a product of his time: a brilliant character that captured the mores of the moment.

Yet the BBC today, no doubt unable to find a single contemporary comedy writer, unimpressed with a single sitcom pitched in 2016, is continuing its rather disappointing, lazy and safe re-visiting of our past, by deciding to re-present old as new. Last week, it was announced that the broadcaster intends reviving a host of “landmark sitcoms”, including Porridge and Are You Being Served? ... and that “lost” episodes of Hancock’s Half-Hour, Steptoe And Son and Till Death Us Do Part will be remade.

Do we really need to re-package Alf? How depressing to think that the world of my youth has moved on so little that a BBC commissioner somewhere thinks that Alf has anything to say to the generation of today.

It says something about the nature of the conservatism we are currently cowering under in the creative arts, that our biggest broadcaster lacks the courage to step forward, embrace the present and create a future, instead deciding to dredge up nostalgic memories of an era that included plenty of brutality, small-mindedness and deep-seated prejudice.

When I think about all the great brown, black, Scottish, northern English writers out there,who have so much to say about this Kingdom of ours, about the politics we are now enduring, about the lives we are now living ... Why not give them a voice?

I look forward to the next call up the stairs when ITV choose to remake Mind Your Language. Satire is dead.