The Ali G Boycott Repeats a Fight From 2000

NewsCord is asking cinema chains to refuse Ali G: Who Iz I? with a charge first printed in January 2000. The mockumentary, Sacha Baron Cohen’s first feature as director, opens Oct. 23 from Amazon MGM Studios, with Sony Pictures handling it abroad.

The letters do not review the movie. They reprint a newspaper headline from the character’s second year on British television and tell booking desks that a legally sold comedy is theirs to drop.

A 26-Year-Old Headline, Now in 20 Inboxes

NewsCord, a UK watchdog that uses AI to compare coverage and run letter drives, opened the campaign on Aug. 26, the day after Cohen posted the trailer. By Aug. 28 it said it had been told to send more than 36,000 emails. One click writes up to 20 personalised letters to cinema chains in the sender’s name, in the chain’s language, to desks at Odeon, Cineworld, Regal, Vue, Cinemark and a long list of others.

The page’s core line is the same in every version. Ali G: Who Iz I?, “written, directed and produced by and starring Sacha Baron Cohen,” opens on 23 October 2026. “The character is a white comedian’s caricature of Black British street culture, and the communities imitated said so from the start.” It then points to a January 2000 headline, “Comics find Ali G is an alibi for racism,” names Felix Dexter and the novelist Jeanette Winterson, and quotes Sony Pictures UK’s sell line, “He iz back. We ain’t liable.”

Studios sell films, the site says. Cinemas choose them. “No film is owed a screen.” That is the move that is new. In 2000 the fight was on Channel 4 and in the black press. In 2026 it is a form letter aimed at people who have not been sent a print.

New campaign: demand cinemas worldwide refuse to screen the new Ali G film.

Sacha Baron Cohen retired Ali G in 2007. Amazon has revived him. On 23 October, Ali G: Who Iz I? opens in cinemas worldwide, and Sony Pictures is selling it to the public with the line "He iz back. We… pic.twitter.com/rwtdG7vejo

— NewsCord (@newscord_org) August 26, 2026

The first wave of booking-desk emails also treated a Picturehouse reply as a scalp. The UK chain, which runs 25 sites, wrote that it “currently do not have any plans to screen this film on its release.” That wording is the stock answer for a title not yet on the diary. NewsCord still took Picturehouse off the mailing list and kept going, and later added the BBFC, asking the classifier to apply its discrimination rules and publish the reasoning.

Nima Akram, a data scientist who previously worked at BT and Marks & Spencer, built NewsCord after October 2023 as a tool for scoring how Western outlets covered Gaza. The Ali G drive sits on an action board that already runs dozens of other letter campaigns. The machine was not built for Staines. It was pointed at Staines.

What Black British Comics Told New Nation

The clipping the emails lean on is real, and it is more mixed than the campaign’s one-line version. After Ali G gave Channel 4’s alternative Queen’s speech on Christmas Day 1999, the weekly paper New Nation asked seven of the biggest names on the black comedy circuit what they made of him. The answers ran on Jan. 11, 2000.

HOW THE SEVEN SPLIT

• Curtis Walker: Called the act “offensive” and compared it to Al Jolson, saying a white man playing “a stupid stereotype” was worse than the impersonation itself.
• Felix Dexter: Granted the joke of an innocent meeting an expert, then said the laugh was still “laughing at black street culture” from a safe liberal seat.
• Gina Yashere: Found the character funny and said she did not think Cohen was “racist or taking the piss out of black people,” but argued a black comic could not have got the same show.
• Richard Blackwood: Worried viewers would think “that is how black people chat to one another,” even if the mask was meant to be an Asian man trying to be black.
• Roger D: The only voice the paper marked as entirely positive, saying Cohen had “done his homework” and that the white Jewish man in the persona was part of why it was funny.

Michael Eboda, then New Nation’s editor, ran a reader poll beside those quotes and found that more than 80% of them were fans. He said the critics were “taking themselves too seriously,” and compared Ali G to Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney: a send-up of white and Asian kids who “adopt black personas and appear ridiculous to everyone besides themselves.”

I feel that a lot of the humour is laughing at black street culture and it is being celebrated because it allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at that culture in a safe context where they can retain their sense of political correctness.

Felix Dexter, comedian, to New Nation, January 2000

That Dexter sentence is the one NewsCord still pastes into cinema inboxes. The Yashere and Eboda lines do not travel with it. The 2026 letters also treat “alibi for racism” as something the comics said. It was the headline over their remarks, not a phrase any of the named comics used in the piece.

Channel 4 Put the Joke on White Poseurs

Channel 4’s answer in January 2000 is the same answer Cohen’s camp still uses. A spokesman said the character “is not attempting to be an imitation of a black person, it satirises white men trying to adopt black street culture.” Another briefing put it harder: if it offended anyone, “it’s offensive to white people.” The network did concede that a black comic might not have been allowed the same material.

The act had a local muse. Ali G, the paper said then, grew out of Cohen’s irritation at white middle-class callers to Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood, requesting shout-outs to “the Staines Massive” as if they were in South Central. Cohen later recalled being a middle-class Jewish boy whose mother drove him and his breakdance crew to Covent Garden in a Volvo with linoleum in the back. “Essentially we were middle-class Jewish boys who were adopting this culture, which we thought was very cool.”

In 2004 he told an interviewer the “legitimate targets” were “successful, powerful white men, who rule the country,” and that British upper-class guests would rather apologise than throw him out. The socialist MP Tony Benn, ambushed on The 11 O’Clock Show, admitted that “at no stage during our talk did I suspect for a second that it was other than a genuine programme.”

A short clip from those early interviews is still the cleanest specimen of the joke. Ali G asked Sir Rhodes Boyson what use a kilo was, and why schools did not “modernise and teach in ounces.” Boyson, trying to be helpful, said it could be useful if you were baking. “Alright, baking, for real,” Ali G said, then asked who bought a kilo of anything “except me mate Dave and he’s doing a three-year stretch.”

WHERE THE 2000 ARGUMENT SPLIT

• Dexter’s view: The laugh lets comfortable white viewers mock black street style while staying politically clean.
• Eboda’s view: The character is a critique of wannabes, and New Nation’s own readers were mostly on his side.
• Channel 4’s view: The mask is a white poseur from Staines, and the people being roasted are the men in suits who humour him.

Sociologist Paul Gilroy, writing in 2002 after Ali G Indahouse, called the figure “a satirical Rorschach blot in which even the most neurotic scrutineers of the national psyche can discover their fears and hopes.” That blot has not been redrawn. People are still putting their own fear on it, including people who have not seen the new film.

Ali G’s File From Staines to the BBFC

The 2026 campaign talks as if the file starts this autumn. The file is 28 years long.

THE ALI G CLOCK

1. 1998: Cohen launches Ali G on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show as a dim “voice of da yoof” from Staines.
2. Christmas Day 1999: He delivers the alternative Queen’s speech, which prompts New Nation to call the comics.
3. January 11, 2000: The racism row lands in print; only Roger D is entirely positive; more than 80% of New Nation readers still back the character, who had just won a British Comedy Awards best-newcomer prize.
4. March 2000: Da Ali G Show begins on Channel 4.
5. May 2000: Channel 4 investigates a Combat 18 death threat sent to Cohen at the network, a reminder that the same year also drew far-right hate, not only comic-circuit anger.
6. 2002: Ali G Indahouse, a scripted parliamentary farce, reaches cinemas. It is the last Ali G feature until this one, a 24-year gap.
7. December 2007: Cohen retires the character, the date NewsCord now uses as proof that Amazon, not he, “revived the caricature.”
8. May 22, 2026: Cohen stars in the Netflix comedy Ladies First, a gender-swap workplace farce directed by Thea Sharrock. No cinema chain was mailed over that one.
9. July 2026: He turns up at the Wimbledon men’s final in a white tracksuit reading “Official Ganja Dealer,” calling tennis “a crap version of ping pong.”
10. July 22, 2026: In character on Instagram, he announces the title and date: “Dey haz finally made a documentary about me.”
11. August 25 to 26, 2026: A 130-second trailer lands; NewsCord’s cinema letters go out the next day.
12. October 23, 2026: Ali G: Who Iz I? is due in cinemas, wide, before the BBFC letter the campaign has now queued.

The pattern is blunt. Every revival of the mask reopens the 2000 file. BritBox already slapped a “racist terms” warning on the old series in 2021. The 2026 twist is that the file is now being sent to people whose job is to book screens, and to a classifier whose job is to rate a film nobody in the campaign has sat through.

Staines to America, With Julie Eight Months In

What the movie actually is, on paper, is a secret-shot mockumentary in the Borat mould, not another Indahouse. Cohen writes, directs, produces and stars for his company Four by Two Films. Morgana Robinson plays Julie. Runtime is 1 hour 40 minutes. The rating is R. Amazon MGM is putting it out only in theatres on Oct. 23, a rare wide comedy date for a prank film that was shot on people who did not know they were in one.

WHAT THE LISTING SAYS

• The hook: After twenty years “chillin’, tokin’ and bonin’,” Ali G learns Julie is 8 months pregnant.
• The plot turn: He gets up and takes a comeback trip to America to reclaim “his former glory.”
• The threat: He meets “adversaries who will ultimately threaten his and his child’s very existence.”
• The method: Hidden cameras, real non-actors, the same trap Cohen used when guests still thought Ali G was a yoof presenter.

The trailer that triggered the mailbag shows the new costume choices the campaign hates most: fake dreadlocks, a Rastafarian hat, and a gag about wanting to be an “absent” father. Cohen posted it with a shrug that was also a dare. “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.”

On Instagram in July he sold it as a “documentary” that “ain’t dat crap one about da penguins,” with “at least twice as much animal sex.” That is the voice the emails want chains to treat as a booking problem. It is also the voice that made the original show a hit among the same New Nation readers who told Eboda the comics were overdoing it.

No Cinema Chain Has Pulled the Booking

Volume is not a veto. NewsCord’s own design inflates the pile, because one person can generate up to 20 letters, and every letter quotes the same 2000 headline. Danish chain NFBIO wrote back that it did not see it as its job to censor or refuse a legally distributed film. Phil Clapp, chief executive of the UK Cinema Association, said cinemas “are there to engage and entertain the widest possible audience.”

Picturehouse’s “no plans” note remains the closest thing the campaign has to a win, and it is still not a ban. Major multiplexes have not announced a drop. The BBFC has not published a rating fight. For all the noise, the film is still dated as a wide October opening.

THEN AND NOW

On X the same week, the argument was less about unseen jokes than about duty. Some users treated a booking desk as a free-speech checkpoint and called the mailbag a ban in all but name. Others said satire that “takes the piss out of the oppressed” is bullying, not critique. A third current barely mentioned Ali G at all and went at Cohen’s record on Israel instead. That last stream matters for who is running the tool, but it is not the evidence the letters put in front of Odeon.

The Trailer Was Enough for an MP

On Sept. 2, Paulette Hamilton, the Labour MP for Erdington, did on a daytime show what the emails do in writing. She judged the return from clips.

I’ve got to be honest, I find it offensive. I’ve not seen the movie but I have seen the trailer. I know he did an outing of this movie 23 years ago, but I do find it racist, I’ll be honest with you. They’ve stereotyped a particular race and I do believe they wouldn’t do it to many other racial groups.

Paulette Hamilton, MP for Erdington, on The Jeremy Vine Show

She added that some of what she had seen online was “geared at a certain community that particularly look like me.” That is a fair statement of hurt, and it is also the 2000 argument spoken again, from a trailer, by someone who said twice that the film was not out. Writer Afua Hirsch, in a Substack note the campaign likes to echo, wrote that as a young woman she “just knew he was mocking us,” and that the character now feels out of time. Dexter said the first part in 2000. Time is the only new clause.

Cohen’s year already included a safer satire. Ladies First put him in a matriarchal ad-agency farce on Netflix in May, and the chorus that now wants Ali G kept off screens did not form around that title. The difference is the mask. Bring back the yellow glasses and the borrowed patois, and the 2000 file opens itself.

On Oct. 23 the file gets a new object, 1 hour 40 minutes long, that the emails never had. Until then the argument is still the one New Nation printed when Ali G had barely started his own show, only now it arrives 20 copies at a time in a cinema inbox.