It’s like finding Liam Gallagher tapping noisily at the no-smoking sign in a pub, or hearing Roy Keane deliver a school speech day address in which he explains that it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game. Channel 4 has censored one of its own programmes for a lack of decorousness.
Coming from the station that gave us Something for the Weekend, in which children had to guess their parents’ sex secrets, Embarrassing Bodies, of which the less said the better, and an Alternative Christmas Message from the world’s most prestigious Holocaust denier, it might seem a little odd to come over all bashful now.
Yet Channel 4 appears to have become more than just careful in policing outrageous language, it seems it aspires to be as pure in thought and word as the most austere mother superior.
For it has banned Kirstie Allsopp, the deliciously wholesome property show presenter, from saying “For God’s sake!” on air. Now I quite understand why many of us, from the Vatican’s Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the Moderator of the Free Kirk, would want to see the third commandment more vigorously policed.
But this edict, emanating from Channel 4, seems a wee bit inconsistent. If David Threlfall, as Frank Gallagher, the central character in its flagship drama, Shameless, becomes an icon of the channel by, among other virtues, taking profanity to a level where regimental sergeant-majors listen in hushed awe, then how can it be right to punish poor Kirstie for a schoolgirl slip? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Advertisement
In any case, perhaps Channel 4 could provide us all, presenters and viewers, with approved terms to convey exasperation, frustration and amazement. Perhaps cripes, crikey and (my own favourite) crivvens could make a comeback. And then, who knows, in this spirit of elevation, uplift and tone-raising all round we could have the residents in the Big Brother House set tasks such as “compose a sonnet in honour of the departing Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster” or “produce a masque to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Wagram”. We can but hope...
No greater taboo
I’m delighted that since last week’s bigging-up of the Thirties thriller writer Eric Ambler in these pages both Radio 4 and The Guardian have been hymning his praises. If Channel 4 wants a guaranteed, expletive- free, ratings boost then it should snap up the rights now. There is only one problem. Given how often his heroes have to pause to soothe frayed nerves, I suspect that a faithful rendition of the novels would involve committing a TV sin greater even than wilful profanity, gratuitous nudity or heartless ultra-violence. The last, unbreakable, taboo of contemporary TV production would have to be breached.
Characters who are at once attractive and sympathetic, with whom the audience has built up an empathetic relationship, might have to be filmed smoking.
Advertisement
A lost Hurd instinct
Or even worse, drinking spirits before lunch. One of the pleasures of vintage fiction is the automatic assumption that noontide is welcomed with the clink of ice against gin-filled glass.
It wasn’t just the loucher thriller writers who took a midday sharpener as read. Douglas Hurd, about as sober a figure as has ever graced public life, wrote several, rather good novels, earlier in his career. Re-reading them, I was struck that his characters all force at least one down before lunchtime.
Now this habit, like tweed suits at church or toast racks in private homes, has all but disappeared.
Advertisement
Cost shaving
I dimly remember one other, then ubiquitous, now almost defunct, ritual from my own childhood in the Seventies. As I was growing up it seemed that there was a divide in the adult world, with men above a certain age addicted to one path, those who were younger set on following another.
The central gulf lay between wet shavers (grandads) and those using electric razors (everyone younger than my father). It seemed as though the electric razor was the wave of the future. And Victor Kiam was the George Soros of male grooming.
But now I know of next to no adult males, and certainly none under 45, who use an electric razor. And yet, as I was buying my Sensor Excel blades and Gillete Gel on Saturday, with precious little change at the end of it from a tenner, I wondered why the much more expensive way of keeping the stubble at bay had won out.
Advertisement
Was it another example of where we went wayward in the Eighties? And now that so much else from the recession-chic Seventies has come back, can we also expect a Remington revival?
Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath