Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Censorship gone mad.

National TV channels - wonderful entities, aren’t they? For some time now they have been censoring out certain scenes. Nudity, I can understand – but cigarette smoking and liquor consumption? Isn’t that going a wee bit too far? Just the other day they were showing an old black-and-white movie starring Paul Newman (I forget the title of the movie). Can’t even remember how I ended up deciding to watch it. Come to think of it, I do seem to have a very short memory these days. At least I remembered that I have been having memory lapses – thank God for that.

Moving along...

Let’s face it – those days smoking cigarettes was in fashion. They smoked like chimneys and drank like fish. The fellow in charge of censorship on that TV channel that day had had a field-day! After the first 20 minutes I just couldn’t take it anymore – out of the first 20 minutes I would have seen maybe about 5 minutes of the movie… the screen was “squared-out” the rest of the time. Of course I tried that watch-thru-the-t-shirt trick, but alas! No joy!

I just hope the same rule will not find its way to the PayTV channels – our last resort.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too watched a movie on ArtTv recently and decided never to watch a English movie again in local Tv because of this stupid censorship.

I'm sure this censorship will be introduced to Pay Tv too. And a censorship on Internet too are on the cards... They will start with censoring porn, but some say the target is to ban the sites which have news which are not so pleasing for the government.

- Dilan

santhoshi said...

they should just run one of those tiny add things below saying liquor and smoking is bad. thats what the indian tvs do.

Bimmy said...

I guess we are not that subtle. We generally like to hit on the head with a sledgehammer :-)

Bimmy said...

Censorship of internet.. oh no!

Unknown said...

ahhhh! the t-shirt trick!!! I'd forgotten that, thanks Bimal!

Bimmy said...

Kokila, did it ever work for you? It never did for me.