Top Five TV Shows They Wouldn't Let You Make Nowadays

[Miguel Sanchez]

The X-Files. Guy keeps on seeing aliens and monsters but just never manages to get the proof to show people? He has a smartphone. Government over within ten minutes.

Fawlty Towers. Guy runs a shite hotel and is rude to his guests. TripAdvisor and a social media campaign would shut him down within weeks.

Blind Date. Like Tinder but with much less choice, taking much more time and with a Tory cow berating the guests. Who's watching this?

World's Wildest Police Videos. There are thousands of hours of dashcam footage on YouTube for people to watch, and the Russians do it much better than this.

Come Dancing. Non-entities dance about for a few months, a series that runs for decades and somehow maintains cultural and social significance? You're not making this for the sake of public decency.

[BFTD]

Yer Da writes...

1. The Black & White Minstrel Show: perfectly harmless family entertainment from before the gays existed, but it was banned by the Eurocrats in case it offended the ******s.
2. Mind Your Language: everyone knows that ****s, *****s, and ******s just talk really funny, but they're all too PC to admit it these days. 
3. The Comedians: you're not allowed to be funny since President Blair made being British illegal. They'd have knighted Bernard Manning in a sane world.
4. The Benny Hill Show: bloody feminazis ruined that, didn't they? Bunch of humourless ******s, the lot of them.
5. Topless Darts: I swear, you'd never get away with treating the ethnics like how they treat the Great British heterosexual male.

[Guest]

1. The Sweeney - whilst violent for it's day, I think this is somewhat normalised now. However, the language used, e.g. spade wouldn't be acceptable today.

2. The Professionals - lots of dodgy geo political stuff, such that one episode; Klansmen, was banned from it's original run.

3. Let's Go Naked - a one off documentary on nudism. Possibly not banned now, however, this was shown during my homework time, which, as a nine year old would have been 19:00 to 20:00.

4. Jim'll Fix It.....

5. Whatever morning kids TV programme had Mallett's Mallett.....

Bonus: you all thought Jimmy Pursey was a nasty punk.....

 

 

[ICTChris]

1 - Heil Honey, I'm Home!  A sitcom based on the premise that Adolf Hitler and Evan Braun live in a middle-class suburb next door to the Goldstein's.  They showed one episode before it was binned.  The writers suggested that the premise was a parody of cheesy sit-coms but not sure it worked.  Here is a screenshot

 

2 - There's Something About Miriam.  An early 2000s dating show where a group of young men competed to win the affection of Miriam, a beautiful model.  The twist being that Miriam.... used to be a man!  The reveal of this was one of the cruelest things I've seen on TV, as the losing contestents all laughed uproariously as the winner looked crestfallen and then rejected the prize of a week long romantic holiday with Miriam.  A tawdry spectacle, sadly Miriam died by suicide a few years ago.

3 - Early seasons of Big Brother.  Before the explosion of reality shows and the idea of being responsible and protective of the contestents there was Early Endomol.  They threw alcohol at people in the house (fight night where people were secretly played others criticising them then given loads of booze and sent back in), allowed contestents with severe mental health issues (Nikki Grahame whose anorexia eventually killed her, Shahbaz a genuinely unhinged Glaswegian) and filmed the most intimate moments of life in the house (Kinga publicly masturbating with a wine bottle).

4 - Early 2000s comedy shows.  Bo Selecta and Little Britain are good examples of this.  Blackface and white guys doing caricatured send ups of black celebrities (Mel B and Craig David in Bo Selecta) wouldn't get near the telly now.  Little Britain featured a series long skit about the disabled exaggerating their disabilities and making fun of men pretending to be women.  A recent example as well was the hosts of They Think It's All Over apologising to Luke Chadwick for repeatedly making fun of his appearence on the show, which aired to 10,000,000 viewers.  Chadwick was a teenager at the time.  There was recently a clip aired from a panel show of the time featuring various comedians making fun of the idea of a transgender man giving birth - I think Dara O'Brien called it, in jest, an "abomination".

5 - Video nasties.  Not really TV programmes but the early 1980s horror phenomenon of video nasties wouldn't get made now but for reasons other than the opposition they met at the time.  Some of these films claimed their extremely explicit violence was a social commentary but I wonder how much of that was communicated to the audience.  Even more mainstream films like "Evil Dead" featured pretty shocking sexual violence and 'Cannibal Holocaust' featured real-life violence against animals.

 

[BFTD]

The amusing thing about video nasties is that virtually any 18-rated horror film made in the 21st century will be more explicit and realistic than most of the ones on the DPP list that had the tabloids frothing in the early Eighties. Even sexual violence in films like I Spit on your Grave or The Evil Dead can seem pretty tame in comparison, largely due to poor acting.

There were already laws against things like animal cruelty back in the Seventies, when Cannibal Holocaust was made, and it didn't exactly do a lot for Ruggero Deodato's career, considering he ended up in a lengthy trial in Italy and didn't see a whole lot of the money made. It wasn't a popular gimmick even then, with less than a dozen cannibal movies ever being made, and several just re-using footage from the others. You could still make such films in countries where they don't care as much about animals, just like the Italians used to do, but it would be a spectacular waste of your time and money.

Edit: Little Britain-style comedy will make a comeback - it always does. Targeting minorities was frowned upon twenty years ago too, so some comedians successfully sailed under the banner of irony, pretending that they were encouraging people to laugh at the outrageousness of their outdated tropes, while also benefiting from a having attracted an older base who laughed at Bernard Manning's jokes about jungle bunnies.

I remember reading comments from someone at a disabilities group who thought Little Britain was great because it would encourage people to see the disabled as flawed, actual people rather than just a worthy cause. Not sure how they'd have felt about it once strangers felt emboldened to accuse them of malingering more regularly.

Edited September 2, 2023 by BTFD