The Toast of London: Is Everybody in the Theater World Homophobic?

British humor is distinctly British; 90% of the time, we residents of that country across the pond don't get it.  Do you really sit through all of Monte Python, or do you fast forward to the Dead Parrot sketch?  For every Absolutely Fabulous, there are a dozen Drop the Dead Donkeys.

The Toast of London is a Drop the Dead Donkey

Matt Berry, who you may recall as the effeminate, pandsexual vampire on What We Do in the Shadows, plays a theaterical actor named Toast, who is having problems.  I'm not sure about all of them , but the main ones are:

1. Purchase (Harry Peacock, top photo)a failed actor who now works as a police artist, caught Toast in bed with his wife.  His attempts at revenge fuel most of the plot.  According to wikipedia, he is homophobic, but this doesn't come out in the first episode.

2. Due to financial problems, Toast is forced to stay with fellow actor Ed Howzer-Black (Robert Bathurst), who lives with an elderly agoraphobe, who may or may not be his lover.  When he convinces her to leave the house for the first time in two years, she is accosted by a flasher. Purchase frames Toast.

3.  Trying to find another place to live, Toast visits his estranged brother Blair (Adrien Lukis), a war veteran with an amputated hand, a bit of a looney, a lot of a homophobe.  He wants Toast to give up acting for the army, since there aren't any "homosexuals" to bollock things up.  Later, Purchase attacks Toast in the bathroom, and Blair thinks that they are having sex, and freaks out.

4. Toast gets a voiceover job which requires him to say one word: "Yes."  But the crew make him say it over and over until he loses his temper.

5. Toast must audition for Cliff Promise (Geoffrey McGivern), who is in prison for Holocaust denial.  I didn't know you could actually go to prison for that.  So Toast goes to the prison and reads a scene about an extra marital affair.

Promise tells him that the character is gay, so Toast camps it up.  The other prisoners think that they are a gay couple, and attack.

So, two scenes where people think that Toast is gay, and react with contempt or violence.  And we didn't even get around to Purchase's homophobia.  And I'm supposed to find this funny?

My grade:D