Fresh evidence of the elevated standards of our terrestrial TV chanels is provided by today's Telegraph:

'Channel 4 is to promote itself with a profanity-filled 75 second commercial in which celebrities such as Jamie Oliver, David Starkey and Graham Norton are asked to say their favourite swear word.The short film will feature only swear words and includes nine mentions alone of the word "c**t", which has been identified as the most offensive word to most viewers...Bill Griffin, Channel 4's head of marketing, said: "There isn't a single person within the channel who has seen this ad and found it anything other than highly amusing." '

Just the sort of degraded, cynical view of popular culture, one might think, which no-one in the public service BBC would ever promote. Yet as the story goes on to say (in a paragraph unaccountably absent from the on-line version):

'Mark Thompson, Channel Four's chief executive [and a former BBC executive], regarded as a leading contender to be the next BBC director-general, has said that he wants the broadcaster to take more risks and be more challenging'.

Happy days.

Posted by melanie at March 12, 2004