Bleeping out, (or should I say redacting) strong language is a bit ****ing ridiculous if you ask me. Which you didn’t.
It’s not so much the ****ing gratuitous bad language that the BBC ought to be ****ing-well worried about, it’s the general decline in quality and morality.
For one thing, this token exercise merely draws unnecessary attention to something wretched, and for another…. I think that one’s ebleepingnough for now.
Will ‘toning down sex and swearing’ be enough to reverse the moral decline? No it will not.
“Viewers also expressed concern about pre-watershed programmes, including EastEnders, which often dealt with adult themes.”
Why call themes featuring self-obsessed misfits and retarded, immature, maladjusted inadequates with narcissistic personality disorders, ‘adult’?
Enough about Newsnight, as Bruce Forsythe might quip.
‘Adult’ is clearly a euphemism, a bit like ‘gay’. By all means let’s have adult themes in the old fashioned sense, i.e. for adults with a brain. And before, after and during the watershed, introduce quality, originality, wit, wisdom, entertainment, information and substance. Surely someone somewhere is capable of providing that for all the £illions we fork out.
Ann Widdecombe thinks the BBC should reduce bad language, (not bleep it out) implement the watershed, (not merely treat it as the go-ahead for violence, titillation and inanity) and NOT put stuff before (or after) 9pm that most of us do not want to see, and show families that are ‘together’ instead of drug taking, broken and dysfunctional.” My words are in brackets, above.
If they do that, as far as I’m concerned, the swearing will take care of itself.
For the full effect, it;s worth remembering that the BBC refuses to even report accuratly stuff that's actually happened, for fear of provoking those pesky right-wing extremists.
Hour after hour of dysfunctional loons, druggies and thuggies being depicted as groovy rebels has no effect at all but, say, describing suspects in terrorism cases as what they are will lead to lynch mobs in the steet.
How do you know what people want to see?
People like drivel, they love it, always have – stick newsnight arts review on at 7pm and see what happens
'self-obsessed misfits and retarded, immature, maladjusted inadequates with narcissistic personality disorders'
It's very rude to describe your readers this way. Tut tut
Torchwood was a good example of the general lack of morals now being demonstrated on the BBC. I started watching it until about the third episode when the girl burst in on Captain Jack and his side kick hard at homosexual sex, they then asked her to join in naked hide and seek.
Nothing wrong you might think, until you consider…it was absolutely nothing to do with the story and had absolutely no relevance, except to further the cause of homosexualising the UK. Any good writing and programming dictates if it isn't relevant, cut it.
From expenses politics (at Westminister and BBC) to celebrity politics (at Westminster and BBC):
"Brown 'saddened' by Jackson death"
[Extract]:
"Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both said they are "saddened" by the death of pop legend Michael Jackson.
"The prime minister's spokesman said the singer's death at the age of 50, after he suffered a suspected cardiac arrest, was 'very sad news for his fans.
"The Conservative leader described Jackson as a 'legendary entertainer'. "
(-the above is on the BBC 'politics' page!)
Talk about the Princess Diana syndrome!
The salons of Broadcasting House must today be sombre and bleak places, as top programmers in linen suits stroke wispy beards and stare forlornly at schedules that need to be filled with something more demanding than profanity and sex. Some harder work is called for.
George Pitcher seems to agree with me. I think.
Many people say that their only objection to the BBC is that they are forced to pay the compulsory telly tax, and they wouldn’t care what the BBC broadcast if failure to pay didn’t involve the threat of imprisonment. If it was left to market forces and became a ratings-driven business, they could happily take it or leave it, as one does with other broadcasters. On the basis of complete privatisation, however, they would risk losing something that, as Mr. Pitcher says ‘we won’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.’
As he also says, the BBC is meant both to reflect and mould the character of the nation. It does indeed seem to do these, and they are self-perpetuating twins like the circular snake devouring its own tail; the more they mould, the more they reflect, and the more they reflect the more they mould, ad infinitum.
Something has gone badly wrong. The newly revealed generous pay packets that the chief execs are trousering would not be so disquieting if they did the job that they ought to be doing. That is, enriching our lives culturally, and educating and informing us intelligently and as impartially as humanly possible.
The problem is that the influence the BBC still has on the nation cannot be overestimated. Even though there is a zeitgeist of creeping cynicism, the majority of people accept that what the BBC produces is reliable and reasonably impartial, unless they have enough knowledge of or interest in a specific subject to know otherwise.
Furthermore, the BBC has influenced other broadcasters, directly and indirectly, as the people who staff them were inevitably brought up on a large diet of BBC.
The advocacy of Islam, multiculturalism, fragmented families, and homosexuality may well have been a response to the repressed post war era, but the pendulum has swung way past the balance point, and has snowballed to include the normalisation of dishonesty, criminality, drug taking and alcohol swilling, and the realisation that this has gone way too far is long overdue. It might be too late, because the new norms that the BBC has both created and reflected have given us a society that everyone agrees, is broken.