Censorship doesn’t make sense
Why is the eraser bandied about in broadcasting but not with other media? OFCOM and the BBC seem determined to remove traces of offensive content which viewers are more than capable of assessing in the context of the time.
If you’re an avid viewer of Tweenies repeats on CBeebies, you’re likely to have come across an episode in which feature a character dressed as sex-offender Jimmy Savile. The BBC received 216 complaints for the episode, first broadcast in 2001 and has vowed never to broadcast the episode again.
Other than being mildly embarrassing, I’m not convinced the broadcast was complaint-worthy. Filmed 10 years before the revelations of the sordid nature of Savile, the BBC did not go out with the intention of indoctrinating children’s minds with images of the 70s DJ.
But the case opens up wider questions into censorship within the television industry. Should the BBC edit out Jimmy Savile from all of its repeats of Top of the Pops? Should the Have I Got News For You? episode featuring Savile be deemed archive-only? Indeed should any references to one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders be deleted from our memories?
It goes on. An episode of Fawlty Towers was recently edited by the BBC to remove racist language from elderly character the Major. In the scene, he recalls correcting someone for using a racist term with another equally racist term. In the context of the episode, the writers are mocking the inherently racist and ignorant upper-classes of the decade.
Only Fools and Horses has also fallen victim to censorship, removing words such as ‘gypsy’ and ‘provo’. Del is hardly a coherent and rational geezer.
As a History student, it is difficult to see pieces of broadcasting history being edited sometimes to beyond recognition. Fawlty Towers, Jim’ll Fix It and even Love Thy Neighbour are all part of 1970s culture, whether 21st Century Britons like it or not. Censoring them now cannot escape the fact they were broadcast, and they are representative of their time.
Perhaps we ought rip out pages of To Kill a Mockingbird because of its continual use of racist vocabulary? Maybe we should ban CS Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia on similar grounds?
Some things are not acceptable today, but that does not mean we can erase the past. Times change and attitudes change. The TV industry should give its viewers some credit when it comes to judging broadcasts within the context of its time rather than censoring things to an unrecognisable degree.
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