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idespread concern about
bad language on television persists, the Broadcasting Standards Council said
yesterday, but one four letter Anglo-Saxon swear word beginning with F is
rapidly losing its power to shock. ‘The
F-word is now used in private conversations by professors and is becoming
steadily and rapidly drained of force,” said Lord Rees-Mogg, council
chairman. A list of unacceptable words
has been compiled, in order of their power to shock, in a survey by the Council
of 300 viewers. At his briefing in
London yesterday, Lord Rees-Mogg disclosed that the C-word came top of the
list, followed by two American-derived graphically sexual terms of abuse, the
M-phrase and another C-phrase. The
F-word ranked fifth. The Broadcasting
Standards Council’s report ‘A Matter of Manners?’ disclosed that most people
think there is too much swearing on television. Lord Rees-Mogg felt that the “offensive M-word should never be
heard on TV”. As bad language regularly
tops the list of complaints against both the BBC and ITV, broadcasters will not
be surprised at the Council’s findings.
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elevision programmes and
films imported from the United States have a fifth more violence than those
made in Britain and are three times more likely to include bad language,
according to a Broadcasting Standards Council report. Satellite movie channels contain twice as many violent incidents
per hour than the BBC, ITV or Channel 4, the report on violence, sex and
language shows.
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he Broadcasting Standards
Council has drawn attention to the steady increase in the use of bad language
on out television screens. In one year,
the average frequency of swear-words has risen from 6.9 per hour to 7.6, and
one of the fastest growing is the use of “Christ!” as an expletive. The trend is disturbing.
Daily Telegraph
27/1/1994 EDITORIAL
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ad language on television
is an issue of concern which broadcasters have failed to recognise, the annual
report of the Broadcasting Standards Commission said yesterday. The report reveals a record number of
complaints from viewers and listeners, and a 50 per cent rise in the number of
complaints upheld. Protests about bad
language increased by 60 per cent. The
Council said that despite discussions with broadcasters at very senior levels,
it “remained puzzled at the apparent inability of the broadcasters to recognize
the isses. Whilst some bad language may
well be warranted by the context in which it occurs, it should be noted that it
may also appear to be gratuitous, causing a level of offence which can
sometimes appear hard to explain or excuse”, the report said. Imported programmes often contained high levels
of bad language, which many viewers regarded as a form of aggressive
behaviour.” Lady Howe, the council
chairman, said: “There is a feeling that bad language has become normalised …
it is debasing the English language and acts against using the wonderful range
of words.”
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omplaints about the
broadcasting of explicit sex scenes, as well as violence and gratuitous bad
language, have risen dramatically in the past year, according to an independent
watchdog. In its annual report
published yesterday, the Broadcasting Standards Council said that complaints
had risen by more than 30 per cent. It noted the public’s alarm at the constant
erosion of taste boundaries and gave warning of the dangers of a “descent
towards the tacky and falsely sensationalist”.
Lady Howe, its chairman, said there was little justification for the
frequency with which bad language was allowed to offend a significant part of
the audience.
TV bosses defend bad
language in Potter swansong
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wo of British television’s
most powerful men yesterday defended the use of bad language in Dennis Potter’s
final dramas completed last year, six weeks before his death. Michael Grade, chief executive of Channel 4,
dismissed as hysteria concern about swearing in Karaoke and Cold
Lazarous, labelling it “pretty perverse”.
Mr Grade said: “These programmes are going out after 9.00pm. The question is, what is the writer’s
intention adding that Dennis Potter always used language with care and
precision. Alen Yentob, the controller
of BBC1, said the use of swear words was an element, one doesn’t sit there
counting them. Its an ambitious piece
of work”.
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he Broadcasting Standards
Council called for talks with television companies yesterday to discuss growing
public concern about rising levels of bad language. Lady Howe of Aberavon, chairman of the Council, said there had been
a steady increase in audience anxiety about swearing and blasphemy during the
past four years. The council’s annual
monitoring report showed that 28 per cent of viewers were concerned about
swearing on television, up from 26 per cent.
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series by Billy Connolly contained so much swearing that
complaints to the BBC for the last quarter rose by almost 500 per cent. His Tour of Australia attracted 58
complaints about bad language after it was broadcast in October on BBC1. The figure represents almost one-fifth of
all complaints to the BBC and is a massive rise from the last quarter. But the corporation dismissed them, saying
that it was a late-night programme and a warning had been broadcast. John Birt, the Director General, said:
“These complaints must be set against the fact that a large audience thoroughly
enjoyed a series which gave scope to one of Britain’s funniest comedians”.
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iolence, sex and swearing
on television have reached record levels, according to a report by the
Broadcasting Standards Commission. More
nude scenes are being broadcast and light entertainment programmes are
increasingly using bad language, the report says. The commission found that more than a quarter of incidents of
swearing occurred before 9pm and the worst offenders were satellite
broadcasters, which regularly breached the watershed for sex, violence and
swearing. Three quarters of the
satellite programmes monitored by the commission contained bad language – close
to a 50 per cent increase on the previous year.
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odern movies contain so
much bad language that watchdogs are demanding a massive reduction in its
use. They monitored the use of the
f-word 1,429 times in just 60 films shown on TV this year alone. The four-letter deluge also included 827
uses of the word "sh*t" and its derivatives as well as 221
exclamations of "Jesus!" or "Christ!" which research has
shown also offends many viewers. But it
is the explosion of the f-word - and variations on it - that shocked even the
most hardened researchers for the TV watchdog organisation mediawatch-uk
Daily Express 16/7/2003
News Flash:
ITV Teletext Poll, 17/7/2003, asked if swearing on
television was offensive.
2,723 voted, 96% said 'YES', 4% said 'NO'.
This visual junk diet of
soaps, smut and vulgar language
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riting in the Daily
Mail 17/7/2003 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown noted that "there are still people
who care enough to monitor and complain about the way our national language has
been so debased in recent years by the purveyors of popular culture, the
mediawallahs, film makers and the ultra cool creators of pop music."
"As someone from the Left, I am not expected to
object to the spread of bad language and other squalid habits infecting our
society … There are many of us today on the Left who can see that something
precious, possibly unrecoverable, is being destroyed and that we have a
responsibility to try to stop this dissolution … The corruption of language in
public culture is just one aspect of the general coarsening of life which is
taking us down into the pits.
Television, in particular, has now reached such depths it is hard to
imagine where it can go next. If, as I
did recently, you try to debate this genuine anxiety, felt by millions, with
the highly placed men and women who are responsible for British TV, they will
not engage except with majestic disdain and superciliousness. Or they react with fearful paranoia as if we
wanted to shut down the whole business and force the nation into bible-reading
every evening. It is time, I believe,
to take an honest look at all television output. Never in our history have British children had such relentless,
often third rate, shrill and brainless television programming that they are
offered today. It was Aristotle who
said that law makers should be extremely careful about indecent language 'for
the light utterance of shameful words leads soon the shameful actions'. Maybe if we had been more vigilant with the
words, much of the depressing coarsening of life could have been avoided."
Click here for 'The
Daily Grunt' news release
Click here for 'The Daily
Grunt' report
Click here
for ‘The Daily Grunt Part 2’ news release
Click here for ‘The Daily Grunt Part
2’ report
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T |
hat
the broadcasting authorities apparently regard the matter seriously is evident
from the way the subject is treated in the Codes and Guidelines. The frequency and worsening nature of bad
language in programmes, identified in monitoring conducted by mediawatch-uk,
indicates how little attention is paid to them.
The
BBC's Producers' Guidelines, currently in force, recognises that:
"strong
language is a subject of deep concern to many people and is one of the most
frequent causes of complaint."
However, it goes on "in the right context strong language may cause
little offence and in some situations it may be wholly justified in the
interests of authenticity … Offence is often caused by the casual use of names
considered holy by believers, for example the use of 'Jesus Christ' or 'God' or
of names held holy by other faiths … Certain, mainly four-letter, words must
not be used … without advance reference to and approval from Channel or Network
Controllers of domestic services …"
The
Programme Code of the Independent Television Commission, issued in April 2001,
states:
"There
is no absolute ban on the use of bad language.
But many people are offended, some of them deeply, by the use of
bad language, including expletives with a religious (and not only Christian)
association. Offence is most likely if
the language is contrary to audience expectation. Bad language must be defensible in terms of context and
scheduling with warnings where appropriate."
The
Code of Guidance of the Broadcasting Standards Commission issued in June 1998
suggests that:
"the
use of language of all kinds is never static … and … levels of offence undergo
constant change … There is also a concern that, in constant use, expletives can
represent an impoverishment of language and a barrier to communication"
It
goes on:
"Research
has indicated that audiences consider the use of bad language to be
unacceptable in certain circumstances and its repetitive use was disliked by
86% of respondents."
In
1991 the Broadcasting Standards Council (as it was then called) undertook a
survey of public attitudes to broadcasting language and published a monograph
entitled 'A Matter of Manners?' This monograph set out to analyse public
perceptions and to discover the degree of offence caused by 'bad
language'. Most respondents agreed that
swearing 'in extremis' is
understandable and therefore somewhat justifiable than in every day
conversation. Distinctions were made
between 'mild' and 'strong' words and how different age groups regarded bad
language. A similar study, published in
June 1999, found that bad language before the 9.00pm watershed is strongly
disapproved of and half the sample in the survey think there is "too
much" bad language on television.
In
the Independent Television Commission's Annual Report for 2002 it is recorded
that a total of 295 programme complaints concerned language. It should be noted that this figure does not
include complaints sent to ITV companies.
Only 20 of these were considered by the ITC to breach the Programme
Code indicating a serious weakness in the Code and in its
interpretation. The Annual Report for
2001 showed a total of 172 complaints about language, the Report for 2000
showed a total of 186 complaints, which, at around 5% of the total, remained
constant.
We
acknowledge that the number of complaints sent to the ITC is small relative to
the number of viewers. However, this is
to be expected because the viewing public is never invited to comment upon
programmes. Moreover, on the rare
occasions when the ITC reminds ITV viewers that it is there to "ITC some
common sense" it implies that viewers can trust it to regulate
effectively. Those who do complain have
to go to some trouble to find the address and telephone number for the ITC,
which is not advertised in such sporadic 'public information' commercials.
The
Broadcasting Standards Commission in its Annual Review of 2002 states:
"Swearing
and offensive language continue to provide a substantial postbag for the
Commission. This often
relates to the use of mild or medium-rated swearwords prior to the
Watershed. Although the Commission
understands that some swearing can occur in error, broadcasters should take
account of the preferences of viewers, particularly when it comes to
pre-Watershed viewing. We have also
received a number of complaints about the gratuitous, post-Watershed use of
swearwords that many consider to be the strongest in use. Whilst the Commission has, on occasion,
accepted the justification for the use of such language, it continues to urge
broadcasters to guard against the casual and gratuitous use of swearing."
Such
a request would be vested with meaning if the Commission upheld more
justifiable complaints about bad language on television.
Overall
the BSC upholds only about 10% of complaints.
This means that even fewer complaints about bad language are upheld on
grounds that have nothing to do with the language that has caused the
complaint. For example, 'a warning was
given', 'the programme was scheduled late at night', or in the opinion of the
BSC 'it was unlikely to have caused widespread offence'. This creates the impression to
film and TV programme makers that the inclusion of bad language in is unlikely
to lead to regulatory intervention or sanction.
The
record of the Broadcasting Standards Council/Commission in failing to uphold
complaints tells its own story.
Complaints about bad language in the following selection of films were
not upheld:
'The
Accused', 'Cocktail', '48 Hours', 'Revenge', 'Internal Affairs', 'The Cook, the
thief, his wife and her lover', 'Lethal Weapon', 'Basic Instinct', 'The Doors',
'Homicide', 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too', 'JFK', 'Final Analysis', 'Breathless',
'The Bodyguard', 'Rapid Fire', 'Mortal Thoughts', 'China O'Brien', 'Thelma and
Louise', 'Bandit Queen', 'Year of the Gun', 'Reservoir Dogs', 'I.D.', 'Blue
Collar', 'Pulp Fiction'.