The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

News 2020

We regret that we cannot be held responsible if the future turns out differently due to inaccuracies in the present

The BBC is set to broadcast the musical Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells despite one of the largest levels of public complaint in the corporation's history.

The stage version of the musical has been running in London's West End for nearly two years, and has been an extremely popular, if controversial hit, consistently outselling even Cameron Windcheater's Carry On Falluja.

The BBC's announcement six months ago that it would be broadcasting the musical prompted an immediate reaction from the tabloids. The Sun objected to the "obscene implications" of the song and dance routine Hey Mr Bluenose, in which most of the adjectives and half of the nouns are replaced by "censorship" bleeps.

"These bleeps carry clear implications that the song contains evil obscenities. We would not want to hear the obscenities, so why must we hear the vile verses which contain them?" wrote Sun editor Michael Portillo in a "The Sun Says Special" column last autumn.

Meanwhile the Daily Maul objected to the song Decent People Shouldn't Have to See This on the grounds that "the lyrics implied that there was something wrong with being a decent person" - an impression that could well cause irreparable moral damage to any children who might be watching the broadcast, the paper said.

"We are well aware that the BBC is broadcasting the show after the so-called nine o'clock watershed and prefacing it with a so-called parental warning," said Maul editor Gaynor Speedhump. "But we do not feel that this constitutes an adequate excuse for broadcasting filth at the taxpayer's expense."

The Maul's sister paper, the Daily Expurge, condemned the song That Old Off Button Don't Turn Me On as "an insult to human intelligence in general and Tunbridge Wells in particular" and urged readers to complain to the BBC director general, the Board of Governors, their local MPs, the Ministry of Freedom and both Archbishops of Canterbury.

"It is both amazing and disgusting," wrote the Daily Expurge, "that the people of one of the world's great countries should be forced to spend hours complaining about programmes they have never seen and should never be forced to watch, when there are so many other pressing matters - asylum seekers, family values, shopping and women's issues - which have a far more legitimate claim on their time."

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