Surprising (if trivial in itself) censorship on UK TV

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Found on another website:

These films are really quite innocent compared to a lot of today's stuff, and the nudity is clearly innocuous.

I do hope that this isn't a taste of more to come in Britain.

It is. I mean your country requires a license for a TV and all.

Most countries in Europe have TV licence fees.

A TV license isn't the sort of license you think it is. It is a subscription, rather than, say, a fishing license.

The equivalent would be not being able to watch live TV unless you subscribed to PBS.

British television is heavily censored. I didn't realise how much until I moved to France where there is far less censorship. Movies that I'd previously seen in the UK have more scenes in them when shown on French TV. The British censorship is very prudish regarding anything sexual, breasts or naked bodies.

The news in the UK is also heavily censored, especially regarding international news in troubled regions. French TV shows the true reality of the carnage in various countries, bodies laying in a pool of blood in the street, limbs missing. People in hospital with horific injuries. Police / troops or rioters in bloody confrontations. UK news shows the heavily sanitised versions missing out such graphic details... it leads to the impression that the troubles in various parts of the world aren't as serious as they really are.

No, the equivalent is that you can't watch any TV, including iPlayer or ITV Player, or 4oD (and most channels don't receive money from the licence fee) if you don't pay the TV Licence - which goes to the BBC and Channel 4.

If you buy a Sky satellite and have no intention of watching BBC/Channel 4, you still have to pay the licence fee regardless.



Agreed - although for most things it used to be a lot worse than it is now (especially after the watershed), some aspects have become even more strict. Watching pornography on the UK subscription-only adult channels is a complete waste of time.



Yes, the French, Dutch, Danish, Swiss and so on (but not Germany) have a lot less censorship across the board than in the UK. Hardcore pornography has been openly available there for 30+ years, whereas only quite tame hardcore porn was legalised about 12 years back. Having said that, though, BBFC censorship is an awful lot better than it was.



This is very, very true. When you look at the newspapers in some European or Arabic countries, you really are not spared the details. UK TV news misses out a lot of important details like this and in other ways, too.

AFAIK all European countries pay for public broadcasting in one way or the other. In the Netherlands it is paid out of the income tax since 2000, but before that, we had to pay for a TV license too. The reason is that publc broadcasting is (or ought to be) as objective as possible,, serve an educational function and represent all groups in society equally. That means they can't be (entirely) controlled by commercial interest, so that the government has to subsidize these companies.

One other thing - some might consider the UK TV licence to be expensive, but the Swiss pay twice-and-a-quarter the amount the British do every year.

Everything you say there is either wrong (http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/h ... /tvlicence - the BBC themselves say you don't need a TV license to watch OD content) or not contradicting my post.

I should clarify that to "watch or record live TV".

The TV license is specifically for the reception of broadcasts at the time of their transmission and is not required to view time-delayed services.
Otherwise people would require a TV license to view any form of recording of a TV program.

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/h ... /tvlicence
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi- ... work-AB16/
(bolding is mine)

But of course, that's far too interesting to allow, so...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oc ... to-iplayer
Since this article is from October 2011 and the licensing links above are current, I guess it hasn't happened. Yet...

Fair enough - I thought that it covered iPlayer non-live material as well now. Didn't realise that it didn't - should have checked my facts first.

That said, you're still not allowed to use the "live" simulcast version on the website, even if the material you want is actually several hours before 'live' TV.

It's not all suprising. They refuse to repeat Benny Hill and Spike Milligan, two of the greatest british comedians ever in fear that they'll offend someone.

I'd love to see them repeat Love Thy Neighbour, uncut, on terrestrial TV just for the avalanche of complaints that would emit. A lot of people would find it grossly offensive before they'd even seen it.

Aside from that, jokes about Diana or child abuse/murder cases are routinely censored, even from old comedy shows made well before her untimely death.

Just one final point about TV licensing: it's worth noting that the UK TV licence does not apply to radio, so if you listen only to UK radio you don't have to pay the licence fee. In some other European countries, it's a standard TV/radio licence.

I don't know about the commercial channels in the UK, but even the BBC bleeps words away. In the Netherlands the public channels seem to have less self-censorship than the commercial ones, probably because the commercial channels are afraid of losing viewers.

The public broadcaster has a program Spuiten en Slikken, which is about sex and drug use. They had one of the presenters try out cocaine and LSD. A couple of weeks ago they did a piece on condoms of different sizes, and they had two naked men try them on, one with a big penis and the other had a small one. If this had been on a privately owned channel, they would have certainly censored that.

Apparently the BBC even gets complaints for Top Gear, when Clarkson says something mildly offensive about Germans or Mexicans or lorry drivers. Who are these stuck-up no-lifers who actually bother to complain?

i know that the general flavour of discussion in this thread is tending toward a political slant, but i have noticed many hilarious examples of hysterical censorship with respect to basic things on TV.

the USA seems to be the most hysterical in my opinion. i saw a documentary about the "greening" of new york , and there were a few scenes which were filmed in parkland where casual strollers ambled about with their dogs. however, i noticed that the dogs anuses were pixelated out. i then considered that due to the fact that the 3 dogs i saw in one scene (whose anuses were pixelated) were darting hither and thither, then it must have required the editors exclusive attention to each of the dogs anuses in every frame of the sequence in order to adequately "rub" them out. i found that thought rather amusing.

i have seen "raw" documentaries from the US which contain contentious images of drug usage via needle injections, and yet when someone on the street in the background sticks their middle finger up to the camera, it is pixelated.

also, i have noticed recently that when someone says a rude word on TV, not only is there a superimposed "beep" of audio censorship, but their mouths are blacked out or pixelated as well, so there is even a visual censorship of the mouthing of the word.

insane.

i saw an episode of some documentary series. i can not remember what it was about because my mind was completely distracted by the amount of pixellation in it. i think it may have been about "crack smokers" or something. one scene was in someones kitchen, and they had all their groceries on shelves, but every product had their labels pixelated out, and my attention was drawn to what the products were rather than to the drug taking shenanigans of the person in the kitchen.
i guess the producers of that documentary failed to anticipate the displeasure of the brand names seeing their products as negatively advertised by simply being on the shelves in the kitchens of drug addicts, and that is why they had to pixelate the images out rather than preemptively remove the products from the shelves prior to taping.

the ethical mindset of humanity is like a boa constrictor that constricts itself around the possibility of it's own freedom to move and breathe.

Last edited by b9 on 02 Jan 2013, 10:28 am, edited 1 time in total.