When is a swear word not acceptable on air?
MONDAY’S High Noon on Newstalk wondered why, if politicians and radio presenters are not allowed to swear, sports people should be allowed to get away with it.
The answer, of course, is that they’re not. If they regularly turned the air blue whilst sitting in a TV studio as a pundit, they wouldn’t be asked back again. But they can’t be fired as sports people, because the standards by which they’re judged on that score are, quite rightly, different.
It would make no more sense to sack a footballer for using the F word than it would to fire a newsreader for missing a penalty. George Hook did, nonetheless, raise important questions about the double standards that apply when it comes to potentially offensive speech.
Last weekend’s Talking Point prompted a similar quibble. Launching into a wideranging discussion on whether social media was destroying public discourse, Sarah Carey’s programme began by noting the irony that, as restrictions on what mainstream media can and cannot say became ever tighter, the internet has simultaneously been ramping up the intimidation of politicians. In unpicking those issues, the show once again proved its worth as a place for intelligent debate.
But just as interesting was that, in the audio clip of British Labour MP Diane Abbott describing her own experience of being threatened online, Newstalk bleeped out the C word whilst leaving the word “b **** ” in all its ugly glory.
It wasn’t that long ago that the B word would have been unacceptable too. Now the late night phone-in shows on Dublin’s 98FM and 104FM already rarely censor even the most foul mouthed of callers, and Chris And Ciara on respectable 2FM has been known to broadcast the F word.
So is it all just a matter of taste and opinion, or are there some words whose use on air will never be defensible?
How times change is also the theme of RTE Radio One’s Sure ’Twas Better. The handiwork of Ray D’Arcy Show producer Will Hanafin, this new show sets out to explore whether life in Ireland really was better in the 1970s, through a mix of archive footage and light conversation.
The first episode looked back at the ban on women being allowed to drink pints in Dublin pubs (“I’d rather see them with something dainty,” as one man put it). It brought out the feminists in Will’s female guests, but again there was more astonishment at how recently such bans were imposed rather than outrage.
The challengesfacing men who wanted careers as midwives came up the following week. "That's mad now," was the response, though the speaker was just as taken by the time, saying that nowadays “you’d never hear anybody on radio with a lisp like that because people would moan and complain about it”.
So at least it wasn’t all bad back then. Still, times change, for good and ill. If you’re George Hook, it’s usually the latter, as he admitted on High Noon: “I’m opposed to seeing women’s knickers in sport.”
File that one under Too Much Information.
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