Like many British millennials, I have sacred memories of late afternoons in the early Noughties, when BBC Two laid on The Simpsons and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air back to back. This holy one-two of family friendly American entertainment has never been bettered. So I watched the trailer for the rebooted more “grown up” version of Fresh Prince, Bel-Air, with the nervous hope of someone checking a bottle of milk to see if it had gone off. Remaking beloved programmes is a risky business. They tend to be at best pointless, and at worst enough to retrospectively diminish your impression of the original.
Sadly, any critical faculties I have were rendered mute. Watching the trailer, I could only manage a single thought: what the hell have they done to Uncle Phil? Played by James Avery, Uncle Phil was a big character, literally and figuratively. He had a hearty appetite and the girth to prove it. It fit his character. Without wishing to pretend this was the kind of thing I reflected on much after school when I was 10, I think as someone prone to a little softness around the edges I found Uncle Phil subconsciously reassuring. Here was a bloke who was powerful, popular, professionally successful, and romantically attractive, albeit not all of them and not all at the same time.
