For five years I served on the Broadcasting Standards Council, and there I encountered a riddle whose resolution has eluded me. The BSC has passed into history. Its function was really just to exist, and by existing to provide politicians and broadcasters with a plausible answer to complaints of the kind made by the late Mary Whitehouse — a responsibility now assumed by other regulators. Our job was to censure rather than censor. We took it seriously. The required monitoring was hard work.
But not always dull work. Ministers were at that time bothered by newspaper indignation about TV porn channels beamed from Europe — Red Hot Dutch was lately famous — and so for summer viewing members of the Council were asked by our staff to take home with us hundreds of hours of video-recordings of the output of such stations. We divided these among ourselves. At home, pencils in hand, we ticked boxes on pro-forma sheets listing questions like ‘NUDITY: [] partial; [] total; [] frontal; [] rear’; or ‘PENETRATION: [] simulated; [] actual; [] vaginal; [] anal’.
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