In 1965, the critic Kenneth Tynan famously used the dreaded F word (as it then was) on UK television. We learn herein that this was a deliberate, premeditated act. Although it caused a storm and even led to death threats against Tynan, this isolated incident pails into insignificance alongside the now infamous 1976 incident in which an obviously far from sober Bill Grundy provoked the Sex Pistols and their entourage on tea time TV.
Fast forward to the 1980s and the language becomes even more profane. We see how UK TV coped with American rap, a genre in which mother is half a word, and with films that were censored sometimes comically, with “eating pussy” being altered to “eating pineapple”, but such silliness did give us the charming euphemism “melon farmer” – melonfarmers dot co dot uk now being an anti-censorship website.
While the watershed – when properly observed – can filter out over-the-top swearing, live sport in the afternoon is a different matter, even if a little lip-reading is involved. Then came the Big Brother franchise and celebrity chefs.
In this excellent two part programme we hear from people who knew Kenneth Tynan, from the very much alive Johnny Rotten, the first man to use the C word on UK TV, many more and much more, including archive footage of Mary Whitehouse and more profanity than you dreamt possible. Jenny Bond is far from the first person to make the observation that the F word has been used so much it has lost its value to shock. And people who swear simply to cause outrage, we call them children. Whatever their age.
[I submitted the above review to IMDb on December 19, 2019 along with my ten out of ten rating. It wasn’t published. I submitted it again two days ago, and again it wasn’t published. It wasn’t rejected, just ignored. No one else has reviewed this documentary, and I would certainly have expected a few or maybe many people to have. I can only assume this is a new policy along with this absurd “wokeness”. Over the past year or so I’ve had a number of reviews rejected that would not have been rejected had I submitted them a couple of years earlier. Also, at least two of my reviews have been deleted. At any rate, this one is now being published here.]
