TV trigger warnings are out of control

The warnings on what we now call ‘content’ (i.e. what we used to know as films and TV shows) are getting ever more ludicrous. Almost everything made before 2000 now carries a cigarette packet-style exhortation or exculpation about race, sex and offensive attitudes.

But it’s getting even crazier. A friend of mine was channel hopping over the festive period and caught a stern banner, on nostalgia channel That’s TV, reading, all in capitals:

CONTAINS ADULT HUMOUR AND REFLECTS THE STANDARDS, LANGUAGE AND ATTITUDES OF ITS TIME. SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND THIS CONTENT OFFENSIVE.

What was this antediluvian horror? Birth of a Nation? Song of the South? No, it was an episode of Birds of a Feather ­– from 2015. Cast your mind back, if you can, to the standards, language and attitudes of the unfathomably distant 2015. Politicians such as David Cameron and Nigel Farage were making headlines. Pop stars Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith were all the rage. And Prince Andrew was in hot water after he was named in documents concerning disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein. So much has changed!

These warnings are definitionally stupid. They take their viewing audience for fools and treat adults like children. They seem to exist merely to stave off idiots on social media complaining to Ofcom – and often only a solitary idiot, like the one person who lodged an objection to the blacking up in the forgotten children’s sitcom Rogue’s Rock, broadcast on Talking Pictures TV in 2020. The idea that a channel is endorsing what happens in a work of fiction is bizarre – it’s like accusing Penguin Books of endorsing murder because it publishes Crime and Punishment.

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Then we have the utter vapidity of stating ‘this programme reflects the attitudes of its time’. How could it not? Is there anybody out there who tunes in to On the Buses from 1971 and is surprised that it reflects the attitudes of Britain in 1971? What attitudes were they expecting it to reflect – those of the Thermidorian Reaction in France in 1794? The attitudes of the Khanate of the Golden Horde circa 1320?

There is also the arrogance of it – the confident pronouncement from a high plane of moral and political certainty. There are, of course, never any warnings for idiotic or hotly contested ‘progressive’ attitudes on screen today.

This silliness set me thinking. In future will there be content warnings on the TV and films made nowadays? If sanity prevails (and that’s a big if), what might such warnings look like? Perhaps something like this:

• The ethnic origin of some historical figures may be incorrectly portrayed for DEI purposes, as was commonly done at the time this programme was made. This patronising practice was wrong then and it is wrong now.

• This film was made at a time when characters were assigned virtue or villainy on the basis of their race or other identity characteristics. This is obviously deeply offensive and discriminatory and we do not support it.

• This TV show contains heavy-handed ‘messaging’ that was intended to close down debate and normalise the crank belief that there are somehow more than two sexes, and that human beings can change sex. These outdated attitudes belong to the past.

• This content is from a time when writers were constantly policed by social media and by other writers using the now-discredited theories of ‘lived experience’ and ‘positive representation’. Content creators were not allowed, or were afraid, to use their imagination and instincts to write characters and situations. Some viewers may find this offensive.

• This content was made in the 2020s, when it was thought that good writing is showing that the Right People are Good, and the Wrong People are Bad. It also contains puerile attempts to shock and disorient the viewer. Viewer discretion is advised.

• This content contains a warning about its content. It was made at a time when idiots presumed the morality of every piece of fictional behaviour depicted was endorsed by the channel that funded it and screened it.

And of course:

This film was made in the 2020s – and therefore it does not accurately reflect those times, or indeed any time in history.