British Television's Two-Faced Double Standards

As many of my fellow Brits know, Bravo has recently begun to show WCW Nitro on Thursdays at 10pm. This is a positive move for WCW in this country. It no longer clashes with Raw, and ison the same channel that gives us ECW (although in a somewhat limited capacity).

But I saw something that I found rather annoying last week. In one segment, Mike Sanders had an in-ring confrontation with The Cat. At several points during this, the crowd let their views and feelings on Sanders be known, by chanting ASSHOLE. Hoever, we Brits did not actually hear this. When this chant started, the sound went dead. We saw the following at the bottom of the screen - "We would like to apologise for the temporary loss of sound." This happened several times.

Now, this is what annoys me. This programme was shown at 10pm, after the watershed. In this same time slot, Bravo shows programmes documenting gruesome murders, the classic adult cartoon series Spawn, in all it's gory glory, and several series dedicated to the adult film industry. They show post mortems, people getting their guts blown out and their heads blown off, and tits and asses of all shapes and colours. And yet they censor the word ASSHOLE, but sow much stronger language on their other programmes in this timeslot.

Also, does anyone remember when Bravo re-launched themselves a few years back? Before this re-launch, they showed such classic cult fair like The Avengers, Time Tunnel, and many more like this. When they re-launched themselves, they showed films and programmes that made Twin Peak look positively normal. The stuff they showed was, to be quite honest, fucking weird (apart from the Japanese Anime). They lost viewers by the bucket load, and this is the reason they now show programmes like Knight Rider, Street Hawk, Cops, those I mentioned earlier, and ECW and WCW.

So why is it we are allowed to see a porn film being made, but aren't allowed to hear the word ASSHOLE? To the head honchos at Bravo, I hope you are reading this, because I await your response. It's just like that Channel 4/WWF Heat thing all over again.

Until next time.....