Send em back where they came from
Friday, 24. April 2009, 22:37:38
Something i wrote to send off somewhere but it didn't really work out, bloody credit crunch.
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It seems a feature of life these days that the great debates that grip the nation no longer fit neatly, as they once did, into comfy categories that one can cheer or boo like panto heroes and villains.
The great ‘TV Swearing’ furore is a perfect example. The obscene calls made to Andrew Sach’s ansafone by media super-fops Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand have prodded what seemed an apathetic and almost comatose TV audience into outright rebellion. As a contemporary issue, however, it falls awkwardly across all my clearly-demarcated boundaries of what’s right and what’s wrong, leading to much awkward fence-sitting, brow-furrowing and mild indigestion.
On the face of it things should be clear-cut: on one side you have taboo-busting alternative comedians with sharp eyes, wits and tell-it-like-it-is street-talk, while on the other you have a motley group of Defenders of Decency & Family Values spearheaded by the Daily Mail. It’s a classic ‘liberals vs conservatives’ conflict (in an English, not much else going on, storm-in-a-teacup sort of way) and by all that’s right and holy I should be leaping to the cultural barricades in the defence of liberalised swearing, hurling rhetorical petrol bombs at the godawful Daily Mail and everything it stands for.
But I’m not. God help me, but I’m not.
For one thing the arguments for a nightly post-watershed swearathon have a hollow ring to them: they are oddly weak and unconvicing, as if while one can swear passionately, one struggles to be passionate about swearing. For example: in his recent series of Screenwipe TV critic Charlie Brooker warned that the recent waves of protest would kill all creativity and mordant social criticism in comedy, and ran a selection of clips of acknowledged British comedy classics that had, in their day, similarly ruffled feathers and caused mild offence: Monty Python, Blackadder, Not the Nine o’Clock News etc. Through a tremendous oversight however none of these clips featured any actual swearing (although there was much creative use of language) - which was something of an own goal. Similarly, Marcus Brigstocke, in a trademark comic diatribe on a recent Radio 4 Now Show, argued that if the anti-swearing lobby is allowed its way all cutting-edge comedy will be diluted and reduced to the kind of insipid formulaic sitcoms that generally feature Nicholas Lyndhurst. However as Charlie Brooker (unwittingly) demostrated, the long history of successful cuss-free Brit-com disproves this; and furthermore it ignores the converse truth: that if TV swearing continues to seep into the mainstream we’ll inevitably end up with lots of insipid, formulaic comedy featuring Nicholas Lyndhurst swearing like a pirate with Tourette’s. If there’s anything worse than gratuitous swearing, it’s crap gratuitous swearing.
My other difficulty is more practical. As the father of a 13 year-old who, like most children beyond primary school, doesn’t go to bed before the 9pm watershed, family TV viewing has become something of a fugitive hunt. Stay on one channel for too long and you’re soon sniffed out and tracked down by some celebrity motormouth or shouty TV chef and forced to seek sanctuary elsewhere in the schedules lest the ancestral halls echo with uninvited effing and blinding. Which we don’t want because, excepting extreme circumstances such as stubbed toes, burnt cakes and lost keys, we don’t generally swear in front of the children.
There’s the rub. It’s not like we don’t all swear. As a Viz reader all my adult life I fully appreciate the splendour and majesty of finely-crafted and well-delivered profanities. But the very nature and function of swearing is its context, in knowing when and where bad language is appropriate or justified, and when it isn’t. One suppresses or tailors one’s swearing to the intended audience and the extremity of the situation. There’s no hypocrisy in this. We all go to the toilet too, but we don’t take a dump in the stationery dept of W H Smiths (even though there’s plenty of paper to hand). It is the forbidden transgressive nature of bad language that’s the source of its power, and just as with sex and booze and fireworks we don’t grant the young access until they’re mature enough to have some basic grasp of the rules. To do otherwise is wrong on all sorts of levels.
The pro-swearing movement, as well as threatening civilisation as we know it – earthquakes and volcanoes, the dead rising from grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together etc – also undermines the spirit and potency of the noble anglo-saxon expletive itself. If we ALL swear freely ‘bad language’ will cease to exist and good english will become infested with pointless and dumb words for bodily functions and sexual acts. It'll be ugly, dumb and dull – imagine the South Downs turned into one colossal motorway service station. As even Frank Skinner on his recent Panorama special acknowledged, when it comes to swearing Less is More.
There are no good reasons for setting swearing free. Tolerating obscene language is not somehow enlightened and progressive; swear words are not the literary version of a persecuted minority that should be liberated from oppression. They are nasty, ugly and brutish and should be shunned, vilified and placed in internment camps. And when they occasionally, inevitably, escape and run riot they should be tasered and imprisoned again. That’s what they’re good for.
***********************************************************
It seems a feature of life these days that the great debates that grip the nation no longer fit neatly, as they once did, into comfy categories that one can cheer or boo like panto heroes and villains.
The great ‘TV Swearing’ furore is a perfect example. The obscene calls made to Andrew Sach’s ansafone by media super-fops Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand have prodded what seemed an apathetic and almost comatose TV audience into outright rebellion. As a contemporary issue, however, it falls awkwardly across all my clearly-demarcated boundaries of what’s right and what’s wrong, leading to much awkward fence-sitting, brow-furrowing and mild indigestion.
On the face of it things should be clear-cut: on one side you have taboo-busting alternative comedians with sharp eyes, wits and tell-it-like-it-is street-talk, while on the other you have a motley group of Defenders of Decency & Family Values spearheaded by the Daily Mail. It’s a classic ‘liberals vs conservatives’ conflict (in an English, not much else going on, storm-in-a-teacup sort of way) and by all that’s right and holy I should be leaping to the cultural barricades in the defence of liberalised swearing, hurling rhetorical petrol bombs at the godawful Daily Mail and everything it stands for.
But I’m not. God help me, but I’m not.
For one thing the arguments for a nightly post-watershed swearathon have a hollow ring to them: they are oddly weak and unconvicing, as if while one can swear passionately, one struggles to be passionate about swearing. For example: in his recent series of Screenwipe TV critic Charlie Brooker warned that the recent waves of protest would kill all creativity and mordant social criticism in comedy, and ran a selection of clips of acknowledged British comedy classics that had, in their day, similarly ruffled feathers and caused mild offence: Monty Python, Blackadder, Not the Nine o’Clock News etc. Through a tremendous oversight however none of these clips featured any actual swearing (although there was much creative use of language) - which was something of an own goal. Similarly, Marcus Brigstocke, in a trademark comic diatribe on a recent Radio 4 Now Show, argued that if the anti-swearing lobby is allowed its way all cutting-edge comedy will be diluted and reduced to the kind of insipid formulaic sitcoms that generally feature Nicholas Lyndhurst. However as Charlie Brooker (unwittingly) demostrated, the long history of successful cuss-free Brit-com disproves this; and furthermore it ignores the converse truth: that if TV swearing continues to seep into the mainstream we’ll inevitably end up with lots of insipid, formulaic comedy featuring Nicholas Lyndhurst swearing like a pirate with Tourette’s. If there’s anything worse than gratuitous swearing, it’s crap gratuitous swearing.
My other difficulty is more practical. As the father of a 13 year-old who, like most children beyond primary school, doesn’t go to bed before the 9pm watershed, family TV viewing has become something of a fugitive hunt. Stay on one channel for too long and you’re soon sniffed out and tracked down by some celebrity motormouth or shouty TV chef and forced to seek sanctuary elsewhere in the schedules lest the ancestral halls echo with uninvited effing and blinding. Which we don’t want because, excepting extreme circumstances such as stubbed toes, burnt cakes and lost keys, we don’t generally swear in front of the children.
There’s the rub. It’s not like we don’t all swear. As a Viz reader all my adult life I fully appreciate the splendour and majesty of finely-crafted and well-delivered profanities. But the very nature and function of swearing is its context, in knowing when and where bad language is appropriate or justified, and when it isn’t. One suppresses or tailors one’s swearing to the intended audience and the extremity of the situation. There’s no hypocrisy in this. We all go to the toilet too, but we don’t take a dump in the stationery dept of W H Smiths (even though there’s plenty of paper to hand). It is the forbidden transgressive nature of bad language that’s the source of its power, and just as with sex and booze and fireworks we don’t grant the young access until they’re mature enough to have some basic grasp of the rules. To do otherwise is wrong on all sorts of levels.
The pro-swearing movement, as well as threatening civilisation as we know it – earthquakes and volcanoes, the dead rising from grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together etc – also undermines the spirit and potency of the noble anglo-saxon expletive itself. If we ALL swear freely ‘bad language’ will cease to exist and good english will become infested with pointless and dumb words for bodily functions and sexual acts. It'll be ugly, dumb and dull – imagine the South Downs turned into one colossal motorway service station. As even Frank Skinner on his recent Panorama special acknowledged, when it comes to swearing Less is More.
There are no good reasons for setting swearing free. Tolerating obscene language is not somehow enlightened and progressive; swear words are not the literary version of a persecuted minority that should be liberated from oppression. They are nasty, ugly and brutish and should be shunned, vilified and placed in internment camps. And when they occasionally, inevitably, escape and run riot they should be tasered and imprisoned again. That’s what they’re good for.
WIDGETIZE