Btw, are there any other Goon Show fans here? That's aged pretty well, in my opinion.
"There's a chink in my armour."
"These Chinese get everywhere!"
I did think that was funny at the time I first heard it (late 80s probably). The Major wasn't that funny but he also wasn't shocking, just a recognisable type of old person. We used to chant Eeny meeny miny mo at the time of that FT episode being recorded, so the N word had no particular shock value in itself, although it was definitely an impolite (if not unusual) thing to call someone.
Now the "chink" joke and the Major's epithets are cringey, because those terms of abuse are far less used and have become shocking. Actually I remember the original Fowler's Modern English, circa 1920s, having an entry for the N word which noted that it was impolite to use it for non-Africans, and thus presumably acceptable to use it for people of black Afro-Caribbean descent! So the Major's earnest explanation of the "correct" use of racial terms is in fact historically accurate even if we wouldn't endorse it now, or even in the 1970s.
I hope FT comes back, with the bad words bleeped out and/or a content warning. Interesting that nobody seems too bothered about terms like wop and dago which were already dated and a bit embarrassing when I saw FT in the 80s. Interesting that the vocabulary of anti-European xenophobia wasn't revived after the referendum, even though the underlying attitudes are now worse than ever.