Offensive Viewing?

So, Chris Langham has been sent down for ten months for looking at internet child pornography. Obviously, this means that anything he has ever appeared in must now be 'contaminated'. Indeed, even before he went on trial the BBC withdrew a repeat of a programme about John Wyndham, in which Langham had played the late science fiction author, from BBC 4's schedules. This was necessary as if it had been shown, anybody watching it would end up thinking that the author of Day of the Triffids was a nonce. Even as we speak, DVDs of In The Thick of It are probably being removed from the shelves of Virgin Megastores up and down the country. I've already warned my brother that he'd better burn his copy of the DVD before he became infected with Langham's sickness and found himself downloading pictures of underage girls from the web, (although reading FHM magazine is apparently an easier alternative for viewing such images). I bet BAFTA are busy expunging Langham's name from their list of past recipients. You can guarantee that if anything Langham has ever appeared or been involved in ever airs on television again, there will be a tidal wave of complaints from 'offended viewers'.

Mind you, there's nothing new in this kind of knee-jerk self-censorship. Every time there's a natural disaster, any film or TV programme containing anything vaguely similar gets pulled from the schedules. The same goes for terror outrages, accidents and murders. I remember that post 9/11 the 1976 King Kong was taken out of the TV schedules because it features him climbing up the now non-existent Twin Trade towers. Then, if memory serves me correctly, the Bond film License to Kill was pulled after the Dunblane shootings (despite the fact that I don't remember there being a scene in it where Timothy Dalton massacres a school yard full of children). Similarly, the Mothman Prophecies was postponed by the BBC after that bridge collapsed in America (although I don't remember the involvement of giant moths being mentioned in any of the news reports). The TV companies seem terrified of causing affront to these 'offended viewers'. I wouldn't mind, but these idiots (for they must surely be idiots if they can get 'offended' by the coincidental scheduling of a programme or film with only a notional connection with the event in question), seem to be tiny in number. Who are they to dictate the viewing habits of the rest of us? I think the rest of us are more than capable of making our own minds up on whether something offends us or not. Not all of us feel it necessary to treat every disaster which occurs in the world as a personal tragedy to be mourned as if we'd been personally bereaved. So, to paraphrase Billy Connolly, if you are easily offended, just fuck off!