Swearing

One of the things that has surprised us is the very different approach to television censorship. There is no watershed as one would recognise it in the UK. Therefore all manner of theoretically adult material can be seen at tea time. At the same time there is an extremely high tolerance to violence, but none to sex or language. Any female nipple will be routinely pixellated (giving the bizarre impression of a Barbie doll - which is frankly far more distasteful). Any even mild cuss will be bleeped or (far more irritating) replaced with something else – making the dialogue meaningless.

This leads to some deeply odd juxtapositions. Fargo was on the box a couple of weeks ago and the scene where Steve Bucsemi gets half his face shot off by William H Macy's father was left uncut in terms of the gore and gristle, but the resultant torrent of (let's face it, understandable, if perhaps not intelligible) f-words turned into “fudge”, “freaking” and “fruity” (fruity??!). So presumably the generation of murderers being raised will at least not be foul-mouthed.

Even more bizarre was the fact that policies to what can be shown and when seem to be entirely inconsistent and private to each network rather than operating consistently across them. So one night at 7.30 Louise was flicking through and found Scarface on (as in the Brian de Palma/Al Pacino version, as in the people being hacked to death with chainsaws version). At 10 that night we came upon Ferris Bueller on a different channel and settled down for a bit of adolescent nostalgia, only to find "damn", "screw" and "hell" being edited out – deeply strange in the circumstances (not to mention unintentionally hilarious).

I'd really like this to be a little vignette that illustrates cultural differences about the conception of morality at individual rather than societal levels. However, I expect it's simply the result of reactive policy setting in response to inconsistently received and recorded viewer complaints.