Op-Ed: Obscenity is off – on BBC TV and Facebook

London - This morning, a guest swore live on the BBC ‘Breakfast’ news programme. He was asked to apologise; some people won’t be let off so lightly.

This morning in an interview with presenters Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams, the film director Nicholas Winding Refn innocently used the dreaded F word on the Breakfast programme. Even though he is Danish, he speaks fluent English, having emigrated to the Big Apple aged eight, and having worked in Hollywood he should have realised that some language is not suitable for a daytime audience. Bill Turnbull looked as though he’d been stung by one of his own bees, and jumped in to apologise, which Refn augmented with his own apology after the interview was finished. It remains to be seen if he will be invited back. For those who are interested, and according to the man from SongFacts, he used the same declension of that dreaded word as did Al Stewart in his epic Love Chronicles, which was used later by John Lennon in his song Working Class Hero. BBC’s Breakfast programme has its own website where repeats of interviews can sometimes be found; if you hope to see them post this one, you will have a long wait, but if you just can’t resist, you can find it here. On the BBC early evening news, a woman was filmed calling someone “a miserable sod” during a trade union debate, and nobody in the studio batted an eyelid. Fifty years ago, that would not have been the case; perhaps in another fifty years the F word will not be taboo on early morning TV either? Now to an entirely different medium, a Facebook page has been set up and removed in quick order; some ignorant person decided the four miners who were killed in the recent Gleision colliery tragedy were fair game, and created a page to mock their deaths in the same manner as the imbecilic Sean Duffy, who was gaoled last week for defacing tribute pages to a young suicide victim. There is now said to be a police investigation in progress; it would be better if such people were simply ignored, or if uncovered, simply named and shamed.