The British streaming service UKTV has removed an episode of that great comedy classic, Fawlty Towers, because of scenes where a character uses racial slurs. It's reviewing the matter.

It's also the episode where Basil goose-steps up and down the dining room with one arm high in a Nazi salute and the other mimicking a Hitler mustache. It is a joke against the British obsession with the war.

The whole show is a parody of narrow British attitudes and anti-foreigner sentiment. The Brits are the butt of the jokes.

To pull it from public view - censor it - is an outrage. It is a worrying sign of our hysterical times.

It seems that media executives all over the world are now going through their back catalogues and trying to work out which programs might offend the Twitter mob.

Sometimes, they are right.

Who ever thought that getting white actors to black up was acceptable? The Black and White Minstrels passed their sell-by date half a century ago.

So did Chris Lilley's Jonah from Tonga, even though he was last on our screens only six years ago. That character's only appeal was to dinosaurs slumped on countless sofas, drinking in the non-humour.

There is a bigger issue here. It used to be the censorious right who, well, censored. They wanted to impose their prudery on the rest of us.

But now it's the illiberal left who seek out offence in every statue and television program. It is a new puritanism which doesn't trust the rest of us, the people, to watch and look and make up our own minds. It should be resisted.

Because of the power of (anti)social-media lynch mobs, executives are starting to act in a frightened, overly cautious way.

From Hollywood to Ultimo, managers are quaking in fear of the wrath of the "woke".

We are told that the ABC is conducting a "harm and offence" audit of its past and present programs so they meet "current community standards".

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Which is fine as long as "current community standards" aren't defined by bullies with megaphones on social media.

Where next for the zealots of the new cultural revolution? What about My Fair Lady where Professor Henry Higgins tells Eliza Doolittle to fetch his slippers.

"Fetch his slippers"! What kind of outrageous example does that set for a girl?

The current hullabaloo is serving one good purpose: it is making us think about how people should be represented in films and on plinths.

But remember, too: give in to the mob and they'll come back screaming for more.

By the way, my German friends loved Fawlty Towers.