Senseless Censorship

I, like many TV geeks before me get irked when daytime airings of adult leaning cartoons are censored for questionable reason.

Today's C4 Simpsons is about the worst example I have seen. All but one line of a scene in which Homer asks his family to guess where he put the garbage is chopped. The remainder is all three responding along the lines of "selling drugs". You think it's cut because it mentions drugs, but in the very next scene Lisa exclaims "I almost wish it were drugs", negating the point of the censorship as well as making no sense to the viewer. You could perhaps argue that depiction of drugs (cartoon needles) and the use of the word wasn't the reason so much as the idea of selling drugs for money, only seen in the cut segment. Probably not, but you could perhaps say that.

Minutes later the ex Garbage Commissioner comes up on stage and tells the mob that it's gratifying to leave them wallowing in the mess they made. Now, that's not word for word, but it doesn't matter. In the original he closes by exclaiming "you're screwed, goodbye" and walks off, but tonight "you're screwed" was removed. Mention of a potential sex act? Perhaps. Not ten seconds later the Mayor exclaims "we are far from screwed". Are we to believe (ugh, I just realised what i'm doing here) that not screwed is fine, but screwed is a problem?

What annoys me the most about this stuff is that they chop it badly once, save it and then always air that version. Sky, to their evil overlord credit, are far more liberal and cut a lot, lot less.

Channel 4 was my favorite channel by a huge margin when I was a teenager, though I never had Sky available to me back then. It's a complete shadow of what it was to me. Having said THAT, there's a good chance that many saw it as a shadow of what it was to them back when I liked it. The C4 I remember brought me all my favorite US comedy and drama. To anybody particularly bothered about needing to air UK shows that probably wasn't all that popular, but given that the UK show business can't seem to produce anything remotely worth watching between hit shows it stumbles into creating every ten years or so, it was fine by me.

Still, I have a good feelin about Red Dwarf over Easter. Okay that's a lie, but I definitely want it not to be what I think it will be.

Wow. This went all over the place. It was supposed to be quick but it's clearly not.