No Rock And Roll Fun

DANGER, DANGER - FLASHING GENITAL AREAS: Simon Tyers has emerged from the latest Broadcasting Standards Commission Complaints Bulletin, where Electric Six have got the Hits into trouble:
Video for Danger High Voltage
The Hits Channel, 8 February 2003, 1700

A viewer complained about sexually explicit content.

Emap Performance TV said that it did not feel that there was any reason to withhold broadcast of this video. The style of the video was so obviously over the top and played for laughs that it could not be interpreted as explicit sexual behaviour.

A Standards Panel watched the music video in which two characters in a country house setting expressed their growing sexual desire, visibly cued by the use of illuminated lights around their breast and/or genital area.
The Panel acknowledged that the behaviour illustrated in the video was intended to be ludicrous but judged that the level of sexual explicitness had exceeded acceptable limits for broadcast in the early evening on an open access channel. The complaint was upheld.

Simon T, unsurprisingly, has problems with this judgement: Note how nowhere in their overview do they mention the band name. However, acceptable limits for 5pm? MTV2, and it must have been on MTV, The Box, Kerrang! etc too, played it at all hours without worry! Assuming it was a parental complaint, would they then go on to complain against Christina Aguilera or a substantial proportion of MTV Base's output on the same grounds? Maybe they've not arrived in the post yet.

And we tend to agree with him - as far as we know, the BSC never felt itself troubled by the Dirrty Video, or the Thong Song, or Tatu visually cueing their sexual desires by standing about in the school uniforms they'd have worn five years previously while snogging in the rain. Although it's perhaps fair to point out that The Hits is included on Freeview, and so unlike the other music channels, isn't a subscription channel, but that would have to be a very thin justification for forcing a stricter regime on The Hits than on its sister station, surely?