The most telling comment to emerge from the biggest exercise in audience research ever conducted by the BBC didn't come from the sort of viewer or listener you would expect to be disgusted by foul and profane language from our national broadcaster – a major, say, or a matron of a certain age. Instead, it came from a young man in his twenties. "I swear when I'm in the pub with my mates," he said. "But I'd never swear in front of my mum. I'd hate it if the BBC just gave up on the idea that you don't swear in certain situations."
Doubtless it can get fairly "edgy" down the pub when the boys are in. This is a quality that the BBC has put at the heart of its public-service remit, as it has pushed the envelope of public taste. But I'm prepared to bet my licence fee that this young man wouldn't team up with one of his mates to leave obscene messages on the phone of an elderly man about the sexual proclivities of his granddaughter.
Such an instinct among the young, not just for what is morally right and wrong on the big issues but also for what amounts to simple good manners, may have come as something of a surprise to Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, and his senior producers. They have been called in by the BBC Trust and told to clean up their act, even after the 9pm watershed.
The survey, of 2,700 people aged 11 and over, revealed sufficient concern about swearing and gratuitous sex on BBC programmes for the trust to demand an overhaul of editorial policy. Offensive language before 10pm will now be permissible only in "exceptional" circumstances.
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