Booyakasha! Welcome back, Ali G. Sort of. And maybe just this one last time

You may well scoff, but the new Ali G film – arriving nearly a quarter of a century after his previous big-screen adventure – looks to have already achieved one of its aims. People are annoyed. There are “calls for a boycott”. NewsCord, a media-monitoring platform, has asked readers to email cinema chains, “asking each to leave the film off its screens”. The last time I checked, more than 56,000 had answered the call. Booyakasha!

There is nothing much new here. Protesters gathered outside the premiere of Ali G Indahouse in 2002 to give Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of the character, a piece of their collective mind. “He is the new Al Jolson,” its organiser Peter Akinti said. “He’s effectively blacked up to take the piss out of a stereotype of young black men.”

As Ali G: Who Iz I? lands for a brief run in cinemas, the same rebuttal will be issued. It is still often forgotten that Ali G – full name Alistair Leslie Graham – was actually a middle-class white kid from Staines-upon-Thames who unconvincingly mimicked the argot of black street culture.

“He is funny because he is delusional,” Cohen said much later. “He lives this boring, white middle-class life in a suburban town, and he deludes himself that he’s living in Compton.”

Maybe offence is still justified. But Cohen, who researched the American civil-rights movement while an undergraduate at Cambridge, undeniably put his invention to worthwhile satirical use.

The character will be best remembered for a series of interviews, carried out in the style of “yoof TV”, with distinguished figures of the millennial years. Too many of them, not wanting to seem fusty, uncertain of the interviewer’s true ethnicity, let him away with comically offensive questions.

Only a few came out of it well. The late Tony Benn, dogged left-wing MP, politely stood up to Ali’s assertion that all strikes were motivated by laziness.

“I decided that the only respectful thing to do was to argue with him and to do so as vigorously as I could,” he later wrote in The Guardian. “At no stage during our talk did I suspect for a second that it was other than a genuine programme.”

Benn was initially angry on discovering the truth, but he mellowed when young people in the street told him “how glad they were that I had stood up to him”.

Cohen moved on to further success with the still-controversial Borat, in 2006, and strong supporting roles in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, from 2007, and Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, from 2012. Though Ali G made occasional appearance in pop videos and at awards ceremonies, the character gradually receded into the early-century amnesiac mists with the white iPod and Gareth Gates.

What the heck is he doing back in our cinemas? “You wouldn’t get away with that now,” pundits say of anything more offensive than a blown raspberry. If social media is to be believed, cancel culture has annihilated freedom of speech. We cower in terror at the commissars of woke.

You know how this goes. Ali G is a relic, as ancient to current culture as Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em was to those attending Ali G Indahouse. Cohen gets all this. He is no fool.

“The fact that Ali G is outdated and problematic is the very reason I resurrected him,” he wrote in Time magazine this week. “The world he’s returned to is, in many ways, worse than the one he left 20 years ago.”

The first thing to say is that few “legacy sequels” have improved so markedly on their big-screen predecessors than has Ali G: Who Iz I? The bad news for Cohen is that this is principally because the earlier film was appalling. A full 24 years ago, Philip French, reviewing in The Observer, declared “the joke has worn thin”.

The new film makes a virtue of Ali’s superannuation as it brings him to the United States for engagement with nutjobs of every calibre. Cohen plays a deluded woke academic who abhors everything Ali G represents. He also plays a buffoonish former Mossad operative who persuades actual right-wingers to don a class of anal cannon.

The willingness of genuine citizens to play along with the madness reaches shocking levels in a closing stunt so hard to credit that it requires a repeated assurance. “Reminder: they are not in on it,” a legend tells us.

None of this is hugely subtle. Nor does it involve the creative cunning that Chris Morris and colleagues brought to the 1990s Channel 4 show Brass Eye. But the film does justify Cohen’s claim that we are living in an even more poisonous media environment than the one his creation skewered during the middle Blair years.

It is, on balance, possible to welcome Ali back. But maybe just this one last time.

Ali G: Who Iz I? is in cinemas from Friday, October 23rd