Puritan Pleasures (Part One)

Cable channel Puritan TV - set up only a few months ago by the League of Public Decency, a militant offshoot of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association, to help promote their campaign for higher moral standards in the media - has been branded ‘depraved’ by TV watchdogs, and now faces closure. The station specialises in producing ‘morally adjusted’ versions of those mainstream programmes branded ‘immoral’ and ‘indecent’ by the League. Typical of its programming has been a version of Temptation Island, in which young couples are tempted into infidelity by beautiful, scantily-clad models. At the end of each edition the contestants make a video confession as to the extent of their temptation - they are then punished according to the manner of their ‘sins’. One young woman who admitted to having sexually fantasised about one of the male models was subjected to a bare-arsed spanking that left her cheeks glowing red, whilst a male contestant who confessed to kissing a female model found himself being rigorously horse whipped.

In a similar vein, the station’s version of Big Brother featured ten contestants living together in a converted church under the scrutiny of TV cameras and being set tasks - such as not becoming sexually aroused by pornography - to test their moral fibre. Those caught ‘sinning’ would be dragged off to the ‘torture chamber’ by masked guards for punishment. Those failing the tasks would be dragged off to the ‘torture chamber’ by masked guards for punishment - one girl who failed the porn test when her erect nipples were spotted through the fabric of her T-shirt as she gazed at a naked photo of David Beckham, for instance, had her ‘impertinent’ breasts severely whipped. Other ‘sins’, such as breaking wind or leaving floaters in the toilet bowl, were also punished, with one contestant - a labourer from London - being forced to immerse his genitalia in a bucket of ice cold water for thirty minutes after being caught masturbating under the bed sheets one night. Doctors later said that he was lucky not to have lost both his testicles to frost bite.