Morning porn earns Beyer’s scorn
The Daily Mail carries a story today (no web direct link as yet, but it’s copied at mediawatchuk) complaining about the BBC1 documentary Britain’s Streets of Vice, which was shown yesterday at 9.15 am.
Scenes included “gay porn stars playing twister at an orgy, a heavily overweight 59 year-old dominatrix, and a trawl of Soho sex shops. Images also featured a woman brandishing a whip and dressed partially in a nun’s costume”.
John Beyer, who wasn’t consulted yesterday by any of the major print newspapers for his opinion on the government’s green paper on the future of the BBC (or, if he was, didn’t say anything worth printing), must have been relieved at the chance to speak out:
People are very angry that they and their children were suddenly confronted with pornography on BBC1 at 9.15 in the morning. I just don’t know what the BBC were thinking of to schedule this series at this sort of time – or whether it should have been shown at any time. It was only yesterday that Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell was talking about quality and standards at the BBC and a new system of handling complaints. Mothers are particularly angry that that the programme has been going out in the morning in a week when many children have been kept off school by the snow.
Where to start? By pointing out that BBC schedulers don’t, as a matter of course, consult the long-term weather forecast? That it wasn’t pornography, but a documentary about pornography? That the BBC has said that the documentary was “carefully filmed and edited to ensure they are appropriate to be transmitted during the day”? That if you are watching TV with your children and a program called “Britains Streets of Vice” comes on, then you probably aren’t switched to CBeebies? That you have the power to turn over or switch off if the sight of a nun with a whip causes you undue distress?
Note that Beyer wasn’t just complaining about the time of transmission. He was seriously suggesting that a documentary investigating the UK vice industry shouldn’t have been shown at all. Apparently the British public should be protected from “distasteful” examinations of reality such as this and The Guantanomo Guidebook.
(Thanks to Dan Factor at Mediasnoops for the heads up.)
There’s no good reason to show such things on tv at any time, and as everyone knows there is no-one that could be helped in any way by them. So if they could not be helped, why show them? There’s another motive involved: normalisation, together with desensitisation.
Yes, Dr Shell, that’s right. There’s nothing that those sick perverts at the bbc would like more than to have us all dressed as nuns and whipping each other and viewing it as normal, it’s not some slightly grubby early morning ratings grab at all.
There are very few tv shows that actually help anyone, so why show any of them? Using your rationale Last of the Summer Wine should be scrapped, along with Animal hospital and any comedy show.
gah!
?????
Shows can inform, entertain, upbuild and so on.
Swearwords dont inform (since they are only expletives).
They dont upbuild – since they limit & impoverish our vocab rather than enriching it.
And they dont entertain, since no-one has yet provided a coherent reason for finding them funny. It’s nothing to do with humour, more to do with the shock of being naughty and shocking people. But whats so great about being naughty or shocking people? 8 year old boys might want to do that, maybe.
Swearwords do so entertain, you fucking cunt. Derek & Clive live. Comedy genius.
(BTW – ‘upbuild’?)
I think upbuild is a word – it means edify.
Youre proving my point that swearwords lead to an impoverished vocab. Impoverished vocab – impoverished life.
When Philip Larkin wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” was it because he was an ignorant man with a deeply impoverished vocabulary? (And I was more questioning the fact that you appeared to be using ‘upbuild’ as if it were intransitive.)
I’ll tell you one thing – the fact that this line is one of just two by Larkin that is widely quoted (the other one being ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’) shows the impoverishment and limitation of ppl’s interests. Any Tom Dick or Harry in the pub or playground can swear. ‘It aint big and it aint clever’!!!
You could be right about the verb; tho’ I guess all sorts of verbs can be used intransitively provided that one understands ‘anyone’ to be the object/accusative.
Where did this talk of swearing come from, anyway?
Thhe documentary wasn’t attacked because it contained swearing but because of the tone of its contents. A broad vocabulary you may have, but that doesn’t stop you fundamentally missing the point.
You said “There’s no good reason to show such things on tv at any time, and as everyone knows there is no-one that could be helped in any way by them. So if they could not be helped, why show them”. My point was that shows that you, presumably, don’t object to, such as Last of The Summer Wine, don’t generally help anyone either. I personally find The Vicar of Dibley offensive becuase it is about as funny as AIDS, yet takes up screen time that could be devoted to genuinely funny or informative programming. That doesn’t mean that I’d whinge to the press under the guise of a pressure group with an important sounding name to try to get it cancelled, I just don’t watch it and get on with my life.
Oh, and according to http://www.askoxford.com/?view=uk, the OED’s website, there are no results for upbuild. Anyone can have a broad vocabulary if they make words up!
Whoops, sorry for the coinage.
Im sure that you are right that there may be other fundamentally unhelpful / unbeneficial programmes. But if there are, that would be an argument for taking them off as well, not for keeping JSTO on.
However, the ones you cite bring happiness and human warmth to some. The kind of ‘humour’ characterised by swearing is:
(a) probably not funny – given that I have never yet met anyone who could explain the humour (ppl laugh not from amusement but because a swearword is like a release – from goodness, or convention or whatever);
(b) not happiness-bringing – i.e. not an innocent form of ‘humour’.
Still with the swearing? Fine, if you wish to bring JSTO into a discussion on a tawdry documentary, be my guest.
I used Last of the Summer Wine and the Vicar of Dibley intentionally as examples of shows, which many enjoy because of their gentle humour, but many strongly dislike for just that same reason. Personally I find the Vicar of Dibley to be nauseating, and I can’t understand why anyone would ever laugh along with it.
JSTO brought a huge amount of “happiness and human warmth†to my household. My wife and I were in stitches watching it. The swearing wasn’t the most important part of the humour at all, it was merely in character given the subject matter. Have you ever watched Jerry Springer (not JSTO)? There’s constant beeping out of words.
You strike me as someone who does not, generally, swear, and you clearly do not find it funny. Therefore, how can you presume to characterise why people laugh at humour that contains swearing?
The problem is that you are conflating ‘humour-from-swearing’ with ‘humour-derived-from-swearing’. The former is a child exclaiming an expletive in a library or church and is not particularly funny (although the reactions of the people who hear it may be). The latter is comedy such as Peter Cook & Dudley Moore’s Derek & Clive sketches and Lenny Bruce’s oeuvre. The two examples I cite here don’t just swear, but do so intelligently, playing with the words and their meanings and, yes, their shock value (or lack thereof through repeated use), to derive humour. Simply saying “Tits!†or “Cunt!†is not really funny, however turning the conventional usage on its head and mimicking the sort of language used by the participants on Jerry Springer is funny.
Watching JSTO in my home, which is far from a haven of “goodness, convention or whatever†(and please don’t conflate ‘not-goodness’ with wickedness), we guffawed at the line “What the cunt? What the cunt? What the cunting cunting cunt?†not because it felt “like a release from goodness, convention or whateverâ€, but because (a) cunt was turned into a verb and used in a manner that I had not often previously encountered, (b) it was sung by an operatic chorus and (c) it was in an amusing scene. All of these were, I must confess, compounded by the vast number of people who had complained about it, the thought of their manufactured ‘outrage’ making it all the sweeter.
Right, I think I’ve answered point (a) of your post.
As for point (b), nobody is harmed by swearing. Coarsened, maybe, but harmed? No. Given that nobody is harmed and nobody necessarily mocked or insulted by swearing per se (Saying “Fuck!†isn’t an insult, but calling Stephen Green a fucking blackmailing hypocrite is. The distinction is that it is not the ‘fucking’ that is the insult but the ‘blackmailing hypocrite), I fail to see how you can say that swearing robs humour of its innocence.
All in all, your arguments are baseless.
Oh, and swearing does not necessarily decrease ones vocabulary, however not swearing unquestionably does, by however many words you choose not to use. I have never heard someone use a word that is not in fairly common usage as a swear replacement (e.g. sugar or fudge), however I’d be happy to be proved wrong on that point.
If people are coarsened by swearing, everyone agrees that ‘coarsened’ is a negative word. Therefore on the scale of beneficial/non-beneficial it is a minus.
You are quite right that swearing does not per se reduce one’s vocab – quite the opposite. But the swearers I have encountered seem suspiciously often (a) to be compulsive swearers, and (b) to have small/impoverished vocabs. There are so few swearwords in really common currency, and so often one hears the same old ones repeated ad nauseam. But Im sure you have also experienced this.
The main swearwords either denigrate God/Christ, or sex. Given that both God and sex are good, one would obviously want to use good/beautiful words of them, not violent, aggressive, grubby, snarling, sneering or cynical words. ‘Cos these are the tones of voice in which people often swear. Negative tones of voice naturally associate with negative words, as positive with positive. But this much is probably obvious to you.
No Ive not watched Jerry Springer – nor in fact Reservoir Dogs. Im sure Im culturally impoverished (and a much less gentle person) as a result.
Have you noticed how tv shows include salacious material and pretend it’s there for ‘documentary’ purposes? My belief is that the same goes for swearing. Once one has the excuse ‘context is all’, one can go ahead and be as naughty as one likes. Of course, context counts for a lot. But there are plenty of top writers who just like the sound of a swearword whether it is contextually justified or not (Pinter, Kureishi, McEwan, Potter, Lawrence). They can always plead that the context justified it, but how can one deny the possibility that some people just like the sound of swearwords on tv, period.
My question is therefore why? – what is their actual motivation for liking this sound? My view is that it is to do with rebellion, with not liking the way that good people show us up as being less good, with release from the burden of having to be good, etc..
My main question: why is it that, out of good people (Mother Teresa or whoever) and criminals, everyone knows which one will swear?
The answer is clear: there is an organic connection between swearing and wickedness (what Christians call sin). The one is teh outward manifestation of the other. If there’s good inside a person, it comes out – it can’t help it. If there’s bad inside a person it manifests itself. And one of the ways it does so is swearing. But it takes an honest person to admit this is true.
As you say, “sex is good”. So you’d like to see less swearing and more sex on TV? Presumably consensual sex that the people are enjoying. Fine, you start up a pressure group, call it something like “For Increased Sex on TV” (FIST) and I’ll be your first member (as it were).
I was saying that the worst that can happen with swearing is that it’ll be coarsening, however since we all know the words then it’ll have no deleterious effect upon us.
This conversation is utterly pointless and tiresome. You are approaching it from an entirely obsessive and irrational point of view (I mean, God? To believe that a magic man made us all and holds the universe together with his magic love glue is just insane) which believes in inherent wickedness of words. There are far more important things in the world to worry about. If you spent half the time you spend here campaigning against, say, the iniquitous third world debt, then you might even stand a chance of making the world a better place.
Hi Tom-
When things are good they are special. They can be cheapened by ubiquity. If they are everywhere they become less special.
Imagine if instead of a concert of various pieces of music, each with its own development towards climax, the best bit of the best piece were incessantly repeated instead. People might protest: ‘well, it’s the best bit, so it gives us an even greater emotional high.’ No it doesnt -not when it’s ripped from context and overworked till it bores us to tears. That’s how special things get spoiled.
Sometimes for somnething to be good it has to be secret. A Christmas present. A romantic mystery tour.
I think the existence of the universe (or even multiple ‘universes’) can’t’ simply happen just like that. Since energy and matter cannot either self-created or come from nothing, there must be something else which does have the ability to self-create or come from nothing. Look at this hulking great universe with more stars than grains of sand on the seashore. When people say ‘it just happened’, what is meant by that? Nothing in the physical universe ‘just’ happens – we are therefore forced to look beyond it for an explanation.
[…] rom Ofcom for showing the series Britain’s Streets of Vice too early in the day. MWW covered the Daily Mail/Mediawatch-UK outrage when it was in full flow, back in March. Ofcom received 58 […]