The other evening, whilst trawling through the channels, I found a documentary called 40 Years of F***, charting the ever increasingly successful career of swearing on British television. Sensibly it was on at 10pm on BBC3, post-watershed. As you may have guessed I am privileged enough to have a digi-box and can access more than the standard five channels. [For those of you out there still viewing so-called ‘council telly’, don’t worry, I’m sure it will be on one of the main BBC channels shortly] I could go on at great length about how truly awful most of the extra channels are but I reckon everyone knows that already.
The documentary was not that bad considering the dwindling standards of the genre these days, relying heavily on archive footage and eye witness testimony or recollections of the main players. It only resorted to ‘Crimewatch’ style reconstructions when the actual footage was unavailable. Sadly this was the case for the TV’s virginity. Like a lot of classic footage, no-one thought to tape television’s first live f**k.
For those who don’t know, this came about in 1965 from the lips of controversial theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and was all part of a personal campaign to loosen the prudish establishment’s grip on obscenity laws and what was permissible on stage. He was well aware of the impact his utterance would make and had let it be known to friends he was going to say it beforehand. Rather more spontaneous was the first live C-word, still fairly taboo even today. A bunch of middle class hippy types invaded David Frost’s show whilst he interviewed an American student radical and during the ensuing melee one of the motley crew [before soaking the hot under the collar Frost with a water pistol] let slip that the radical was ‘the most insufferable cant’ he knew. In retrospect, I’d imagine the water pistol antics were an attempt to take the heat of him rather than dampen Frost's ardour.
The retrospective dawdled on through the ‘70’s terminating with the hilarious Sex Pistols v Bill Grundy tea-time swear-athon. Although looking back, the airwaves didn’t turn quite as blue as we remember. Spurred on by Johnny Rotten’s accidental sh*t, Grundy, drunk as the proverbial high court judge, thought he would take the outrageous pop pirates down a peg or two. He reckoned without Steve Jones, the mad as a brush guitarist. Whilst the assembled looked on a bit embarrassed, Bill waded in, however Jones let fly with a foul mouth torrent of sheer comedy genius culminating in ‘you fackin’ rotter!’ As director Alex Cox remarked on the programme, this was a wonderfully archaic word. I have always thought so myself.
Mr Cox leads me on to my main point. The documentary has a second part, but I doubt I’ll watch it. In today’s terms, the legendary ‘Filth and the Fury’ Grundy massacre [Reg ended up fast tracked to the dole queue afterwards], is something you might expect on Hollyoaks or the like. The verbal pit bull that is Alan Ramsey puts most Hollywood Mafia movies to shame. Someone swears now and it doesn’t generally get a mention in the papers, a far cry from when The Sun, [that bastion of the moral high ground] could only describe Tynan’s outburst as ‘that word’. Luckily they caught on fast and gave us the now legendary ‘Bastards’ banner headline many years later. Strangely, the B-word lost its power fairly quickly, perhaps because of its two syllables as opposed to its shorter rivals.
Nevertheless even in the 1980’s wholesale cursing was still frowned upon and Sweary Mary films often had to be re-dubbed for T.V audiences with ridiculous results. This in turn led to a high volume of viewer complaints demanding the uncut foul mouthed versions, which in the end triumphed. Luckily for the connoisseurs of these preposterous telly versions, Channel Five still have loads, [Scarface and Midnight Run are classics of the genre, although I’d have loved to have seen a sanitised Goodfellas.] All are filled with ‘freak offs’ and ‘melon-farmers’. We are indebt to the aforementioned Alex Cox for this particular timeless clean curse. Realising his swear-athon movie Repo-man would need a respray, he set about finding the silliest alternatives he could and low m*ther-f*cker became melon farmer. Priceless. For instance we could have the following dialogue;-
GANGSTER #1
F*ck you, you f*ckin’m*ther-f*ckin’ c*nt, son of a bitch b*stard!
GANGSTER#2
No f*ck you, you f*ckin’ no good c*ck-sucking assh*le p*ssyhole!
This would become:
Freak you, you flippin’ melon-farmin’ clunk, son of a bandit bystander!
No flack you, you fraggin’ no good cake slicing artichoke pineapple!
Then reported by a very conservative newspaper as:
That F-word you, you That F-word-ing mother That F-word-ing , That Very Bad Word, son of a That Not So Bad B-Word, Bad B-word
No That F-word, you That F-word-ing, no good No So Bad C-word sucking Bad A-word hole, cat hole.
Another thing about swearing is, as someone once said, [possibly me, but I doubt it very much] the only people who can swear properly are: The Scots, The Irish and New Yorkers. Althoughthe prize for the cleverest use of pretend swearing has to go to Father Ted. Replace 'u' with 'e' and you have a comedy that even Mary Whitehouse would feckin' love.
lairdofhunterhill
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