Language Most Foul
Last week, I was involved in the taping of a television program where, for reasons no one could later explain, the talk soon turned to cock rings. While the resultant humour was perhaps not the finest recorded on the subject (it’s hard to top Mr Show’s commercial for the ‘Cock Ring Warehouse’), several big laughs were generated during an ensuing discussion about whether the phrase ‘cock ring’ could even be used in a ‘family timeslot’.* I understand the subject is rarely broached during Packed to the Rafters.
These days, it’s hard to know exactly where the line is to be drawn. Back when I was in short pants, Graham Kennedy scandalised a nation with his infamous ‘crow call’ and was banned from live TV. Thirty years later, a massively successful children’s movie featured the constant repetition of the name ‘Farquaad’ and no one batted an eyelid.
When I started doing radio in New Zealand in 1984, even the word ‘bloody’ was considered a hot potato, resulting in mystifying references to the band My Blimmin’ Valentine and the movie Sunday Flipping Sunday. The fact that U2 were belting it out literally dozens of times every shift was awkwardly ignored. In 1987, when the D-Generation took over Breakfast on EONfm, I recall a heated discussion with a producer who insisted we not use the word ‘bugger’ on air (Me: ‘But it’s a commonly heard exclamation.’ Producer: ‘Yes, but don’t you know what it means?’). On television, a sketch we shot depicting a fake prank show called Bugger That For a Joke never made it to air, although that may have had more to do with the quality of the script. But once then-Prime Minister Bob Hawke had barked out the word ‘Bullshit!’ in response to a question on A Current Affair, the floodgates opened and a new era of Swearing on the Telly began.
Precisely when the F-word became acceptable is harder to pinpoint. It certainly wasn’t allowed when we started doing The Late Show in 1992. A sketch of mine depicting an uncharacteristically foul-mouthed Penelope Keith in a Scorsese-directed episode of To the Manor Born was deemed ‘unfilmable’. Our show was broadcast at ten pm Saturdays, but when we pointed out that a recent episode of Sean’s Show had featured the star, Irish comedian Sean Hughes, peeling off several unbeeped ‘fuck’s at nine-thirty pm on a Monday, word came back that ‘overseas swearing’ was looked upon differently.
On radio’s Martin/Molloy in the mid-nineties, a somewhat overused running joke involved me ‘not realising’ that the song had finished and continuing an off-air conversation that was always arrested after the letter ‘u’ but before the letter ‘c’ in the offending word. Unfortunately, the manager of a country station running a syndicated version of the show wasn’t familiar with this ‘gag’ and, convinced I’d actually ‘dropped the magic’, complained not to our office but to the then-radio writer of the Herald Sun. This man (who now produces a show on the very station Martin/Molloy went out on), wrote a series of articles alleging that I had sworn on air and that our show was being investigated by the broadcasting authorities. But while it was true that we were being investigated, it had nothing to do with the alleged ‘F-bomb’ (which, as one listen to the tape confirmed, hadn’t happened). The complaint actually concerned our very real use of the word ‘bastard’ in a pre-recorded sketch. The driver of a Queensland school bus had claimed that the word had leapt from his radio into the unsoiled ears of the two-dozen kiddies he was shepherding home one sunny afternoon. But, once it had been pointed out that a. in the same half-hour, two election commercials for the Democrats had been broadcast, both containing the phrase ‘Keeping the Bastards Honest’, and b. in Queensland it’s illegal to play a radio on a school bus, the charges were quietly dropped.
One night in 1998, Rob Sitch dropped an F on Network Ten’s The Panel and all hell broke loose. Seemingly forgotten during the subsequent talkback-fuelled outrage was the fact that it was after eleven pm when he said it, and that, two years earlier, Billy Connolly had said it about a hundred times during his World Tour of Australia series, which went out at eight-thirty pm on Channel Seven. For the record, what Rob said was ‘Who the fuck is Donna Gubbay?’ Truer words now than when they were spoken. And as for Connolly’s World Tour, when Shaun Micallef did an exact parody of it on Seven’s Full Frontal, he was forced to beep all the ‘fuck’s, despite the fact that the sketch was being broadcast later than the show it was parodying. Another case of ‘overseas swearing’, I presume.
By 2007, on my most recent commercial radio show, Get This, comedian and author Bob Franklin was able to deploy the dreaded C-word in reference to certain individuals in the Triple-M programming department, without attracting even a single complaint. Not even from the individuals concerned, who were, by that time, well used to this sort of thing.
Now I realise that, in almost all of the examples cited, the offending words were used with comic intent. And this prompts the question ‘But is swearing actually funny?’, or at least it would if my mum were the one doing the asking. In comedy, rarely does a day go by without someone claiming that swearing is ‘lazy’ and that ‘if you have to use those words, then you aren’t a real comedian’. My response to this is almost always a predictably blunt obscenity. I can’t help it. I find bad language hilarious. This is probably because all of my adult life has been spent around people who like to swear and take pride in doing it properly. But I understand that it’s not for everyone. I recently spent a couple of weeks working for ABC radio. Around the office, I felt like Tony Montana making a cameo appearance on Antiques Roadshow.
Similarly, in a review of my recent book, A Nest of Occasionals, for Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine, Rebecca Whitehead writes that while ‘Tony Martin’s Lolly Scramble was free-flowing brilliance’, the stories in Occasionals are ‘often hidden behind a plethora of four-letter words which, out of place as they were, reminded me of a friend who at the age of 75 suddenly lost the ability to recognise socially acceptable language’. Again, for the record, in Lolly Scramble, the F-word is used eighty-five times, in Occasionals, eighty-nine times. Apparently, the difference between ‘free-flowing brilliance’ and a full-blown descent into mental illness is: four ‘fuck’s.
As for the earlier-mentioned cock ring discussion, I have no idea whether it will make it to air. I did point out to the show’s host that I managed to slip a reference to ‘teabagging’ into an episode of Thank God You’re Here that went out at seven-thirty pm. Not that there’s anything remotely amusing about the arcane practice of lowering your testicles onto someone’s forehead. As I discovered this week, when I was caught at the lights, loudly changing the lyrics to a Rolling Stones song:
It’s down to me,
Change has come,
Under my plums.
Stop that. It’s not funny. Let alone socially acceptable.
* The program, an episode of ‘Spicks and Specks’, was subsequently screened without the cock rings discussion; however, a small piece of it can be seen on YouTube.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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