This recording sounds as if someone had merely put an old well worn record on to disc, crackles included.

It’s all very well people who are not black saying ‘I didn’t think about it that way’”, he told them, “it’s the people who are black” whose views surely needed to be taken into account. It marked a turning point away from public discussions of blacking up, racism, and representation in Britain. Stephen Murphy, Senior Programme Officer at the BBC’s competitor, ITV, also privately wrote to Lamb expressing his support, ‘blacking up is a theatrical convention so old that is has lost any derogatory meaning,’ and noting that CARD’s only contribution was ‘to create a racial issue where none exists’.

Opening in Melbourne in 1962, the show secured full houses for all evening and matinee performances, so they were held over. David Hendy, Professor of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex, comments that Barrie Thorne, the corporation's chief accountant, described the series in an internal memo to Director of Television Kenneth Adam in 1962 as being "a disgrace and an insult to coloured people". White British film and television producers, as well as audiences, were unable and unwilling to see blacking up as racist at that point. But in the 1970s, so dire were the possibilities for regular employment in television – or indeed in the entertainment industry more broadly – that this was precisely what happened.

An episode of the BBC comedy series The Goodies (" Alternative Roots"), spoofed the positive reception of The Black and White Minstrel Show, suggesting that any programme could double its viewing figures by being performed in blackface, and mentioning that a series of The Black and White Minstrel Show had been tried without make up.H. Elliott, singing in blackface, spawned so many imitators that he started referring to himself as ‘the original chocolate coloured coon’.