Tuesday 28 June 2011

FCC's Rules Against Nudity Reviewed

The constitutionality of federal rules that effectively bar the broadcast of nudity and profanity when children are likely to be tuned in will be taken up by the Supreme Court in its next term, the justices said Monday. The case, brought by broadcasters seeking to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's curbs on indecent broadcast speech, sets up an opportunity for the Roberts Court to break new ground on free-speech rights.

The Supreme Court hasn't directly addressed the First Amendment issues raised by the FCC's longstanding rules against broadcast indecency since a 1978 decision that allowed the agency to fine a radio station for broadcasting a monologue on dirty words by the late comedian George Carlin.

A divided court ruled for the FCC on narrow grounds in 2009, finding the agency's stepped-up efforts to combat indecency were a legally permissible exercise of the agency's administrative powers. Now the court has indicated it would hear broadcasters' arguments that the FCC's rules are unconstitutional and no longer necessary as cable and broadband have broken the hold federally licensed broadcasters once had over what Americans listen to on the radio and watch on television.


FCC rules prohibit station owners from airing indecent content, including images and words, between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when children are more likely to be in the audience. Although stations can air all of the racy content they want in the late evening and early morning hours, they generally don't out of concern they might offend advertisers and viewers.

One case before the court involves Fox Television broadcasts of the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards in which Cher and Nicole Richie uttered expletives. Another case involves ABC's airing of a 2003 episode of "NYPD Blue" that depicted a woman's naked buttocks. The Supreme Court will consider one appeal that consolidates the two cases.

The FCC found Fox was in violation of indecency prohibitions but didn't sanction the network. In the "NYPD Blue" case, the agency fined 45 ABC network-owned or affiliated stations that aired the episode.

Fox is a division of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal. "We look forward to the Supreme Court's review of the significant constitutional issues in the case. We are hopeful that the court will ultimately agree that the FCC's indecency enforcement practices trample on the First Amendment rights of broadcasters," a Fox spokesman said Monday.

An FCC spokesman said the agency "is hopeful that the Court will affirm the commission's exercise of its statutory responsibility to protect children and families from indecent broadcast programming."

Separately, the court agreed to decide whether the police can covertly install a GPS tracking device on a suspect's car without a warrant. The justices will review a ruling that threw out a drug-trafficking conviction based in part on GPS evidence regarding the suspect's whereabouts. Lower courts have issued conflicting decisions on whether warrantless GPS monitoring violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches.
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Sunday 26 June 2011

True Blood S04E01

True Blood fans have another reason to be fangful thanks to a lesbian tryst in the new series reports The Sun. The vampire show's bosses have raised the stakes yet again bringing in the steamy scenes between Tara Thornton, played by Rutina Wesley, and Vedette Lim who guest stars as her girlfriend Naomi. The first episode of the fourth series — which just aired in the US — saw the lesbian lovers hook up after Tara fled the town of Bon Temps winding up working the cage-fighting circuit in New Orleans.

Actress Rutina admitted she was delighted to be able to sink her teeth into the Sapphic love plot which sees her indulge in several sex scenes with Vedette. The 32-year-old told Entertainment Weekly: "When I first got the script, I thought it was great. They've always given me stuff that challenged me as an actor and that was fun. I think Tara — if she is going to have a love interest this season — she's finally ready for it. She's had time to find herself and think a little bit. I think she's finally going to love herself in a way that is beautiful.


Television Series: True Blood (S04E01- She's Not There)
Release Date: June 2011
Actress: Anna Paquin, Vedette Lim & Rutina Wesley
Video Clip Credit: El Amigo

Anna Paquin










Rapid
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Mega




Vedette Lim & Rutina Wesley










Rapid
or
Mega
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Thursday 16 June 2011

We're All Going To Hell

Emmy Rossum has joked that all the people involved in the US remake of Shameless will go to hell because of the show.

The actress told Metro that the only time she worried that the series had gone too far for American audiences was when they shot a scene featuring a grandmother overdosing on cocaine.


Rossum, who plays Fiona in the show, said: "The actress who was doing it was about 93and it was her birthday. She had clearly never used drugs because she couldn't figure out how to do it.

'She kept trying to exhale and blow out - it was extremely funny watching our director explain they would just use a hairdryer off camera and have the cocaine blown away, and that all she had to do was mime."

She joked: "It's moments like that when I thought, wow, we're all going to hell."

Her co-star William H. Macy quipped: "America is morally schizophrenic and I worried about the underage sex and the gay sex, and the gay underage sex."
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Tuesday 14 June 2011

Gay Bedroom Scene Sparks Uproar

An EastEnders episode that showed a gay couple apparently naked in bed has sparked an audience backlash reports the Daily Mail. At least 125 viewers complained that a scene featuring the characters Christian Clarke and Syed Masood was inappropriate for the show’s pre-watershed slot. The pair were lying in bed together, with no tops on, and bedclothes pulled up to their chests. The two characters, who are trying to adopt and are planning a civil ceremony, also shared a brief kiss.

They were seen joking about getting matching rings and not changing their names when they tie the knot. Syed was seen with his arm draped around his partner as they cuddled up in bed in the short scene. Some viewers said the broadcast made for ‘uncomfortable’ viewing and was guilty of ‘confusing their kids’.


But the BBC revealed yesterday it had received 77 messages from members of the public praising it for showing the scene. In a statement, the corporation said it approached the portrayal of gay relationships in ‘exactly the same way’ as it did heterosexual scenes and the scenes were suitable for pre-watershed viewing. It said it could not ‘discriminate’ by treating gay characters differently to other people shown in the programme.



The mixed response from viewers to the scenes confirms the findings of a BBC survey last year, which showed that gay relationships are still a divisive issue. Although 49 per cent of people were comfortable with homosexual scenes, 18 per cent were unhappy with them and a further 32 per cent were ambivalent. One viewer, writing on the BBC’s message board, said of the EastEnders episode, which aired two weeks ago: ‘I’m not a homophobe but really do not want to see gay men in bed naked and kissing, especially whilst my ten-year-old daughter is sitting with me, before the watershed. Might be socially acceptable to some but there is a time and place and definitely not before nine o’clock, confusing my kids. There was no warning.’

Another viewer said: ‘If I had a ten-year-old I don’t think I’d be happy with them seeing that particular scene whether it was a gay couple or a straight couple.’ A third wrote on the message board: ‘Last night’s scene was too much at that time of the evening. I felt quite uncomfortable watching it and we don’t even have kids.’

But others praised the BBC, with one writing of ‘the fabulous portrait of the relationship between Syed and Christian’. The viewer said the gay bed scene was a ‘big step towards equality’. Another said: ‘It makes a refreshing change to see a positive portrayal of a gay couple on primetime TV and I applaud everyone involved for making this storyline such a powerful, moving and compelling one.’
One even joked of seeing two men in bed together: ‘Morecambe and Wise did it all the time.’

The BBC’s statement said: ‘EastEnders aims to reflect real life, and this means including and telling stories about characters from many different backgrounds, faiths, religions and sexualities. In 1987, EastEnders showed the first ever gay kiss on primetime television when Barry Clark kissed his partner Colin Russell.
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Wednesday 8 June 2011

Not In Front Of The Children

David Cameron wants broadcasters to keep TV clean before 9pm but he's fighting a losing battle – technology has made traditional family viewing a thing of the past, writes Mark Lawson.

In 2004, US television suffered what has become, in industry shorthand, its "Janet Jackson moment", when the singer's nipple was exposed to 90 million viewers of the Superbowl. Although a federal fine imposed on the CBS network was later overturned by a court of appeal, enough viewers and advertisers expressed concern for it generally to be accepted that US broadcasters have become more cautious in areas that go far beyond celebrity brassieres.

Seven years on, British TV may be on the brink of a similar "Rihanna/ Christina Aguilera moment". Following controversy over highly sexualised routines featuring the pop stars during last year's final of The X Factor on ITV1 – an early-evening show that is known to be one of the few modern series watched by families together – David Cameron has given broadcasters here four months to improve their policing of the 9pm "watershed", the regulatory boundary before which explicit material has traditionally not been screened. The prime minister has endorsed a report by Reg Bailey – who is, counter-intuitively, chief executive of the Mother's Union – that accuses the watchdog Ofcom of being too weak with its age-appropriate controls.


Just as many American TV executives now admit to thinking, in a version of historians' way with Christ, before-Janet and after-Janet, so Cameron and Bailey clearly hope to impose an after-Rihanna attitude on our producers.

And this seems likely to be a popular campaign. Whereas most disputes over entertainment content divide by political allegiance – with liberals traditionally more tolerant than conservatives over strong language and sex scenes on screen – concern about the premature sexualisation of young people forms a broad coalition: parents, grandparents, liberals, conservatives, traditionalists and feminists.

In my own case, though generally liberal about the broadcasting of strong content with proper watersheds and advance warnings, I think there is no doubt that The X Factor catastrophically misunderstood both its timeslot and its particular audience when choreographing and dressing the guest acts for the 2010 final.

The problem is that talent shows are neither the only nor the biggest problem in this area and, by calling for a regulatory crackdown, the prime minister and the government are completely failing to understand the way in which television is now produced and consumed, especially when it comes to shows watched by the young.

Cameron almost certainly will be successful in achieving a clean-up of live talent shows and high-profile terrestrial TV series that go out close to 9pm. These, though, are a very small part of the broadcast output. There are now hundreds of digital channels, many of whose post-watershed schedules go far beyond any level of explicitness ever contemplated by the older networks and over which Ofcom has only loose control.

And, crucially, even if the watershed can be strictly imposed, it is meaningless because viewers increasingly watch shows at a time of their own choosing, through hard drives, online replay sites and box sets.

Recently, I happened to mention to a senior politician and a long-serving TV executive scenes of drunken sex in the programme Geordie Shore, a variant of Big Brother in which eight young people from the north-east share a house and are encouraged to jump on each other, an outcome accelerated by the provision of a fridge filled with booze, a hot-tub and a so-called "shag-pad".

"Good God, what channel is that on and at what time?" was the response from both of the people I told. But that reaction is, as they say, so last century. Although notionally screened at 10pm on MTV – a suitably late slot in both Ofcom and Cameron/Bailey terms – it is one of the shows most often down-loaded on sites such as iTunes.

Although these portals require buyers to tick a box acknowledging that they are over the age of 18, this defence depends entirely on honest self-declaration. Most parents of teenagers will tell you that Geordie Shore and many other post-watershed shows are being watched on computers and mobile phones at all times of day by viewers well under the age of 18.

The Cameron/Bailey emphasis on broadcasting border patrol fails to acknowledge that time and place are becoming ever more irrelevant to television viewing. The watershed rules assume a television set in a living room that is watched, from, say, 4pm until midnight, in different combinations of family members, their availability decided by the time they come in from school or work or go to bed.

Now, though, younger audiences especially are likely to see shows online or on DVDs from box sets that they have either bought or, more likely, borrowed or copied. In this context, persuading the BBC, ITV or Channel 4 to go easy around 9pm is like trying to stop terrorism by increasing sniffer-dog patrols at airports: the public may be reassured, but the terrorists will simply achieve their ends another way.

And this is where we come to the fluttering parental heart of the matter. Arguments about the television watershed always turn on the question of how parents should and do control their children.

The significance of 9pm as the TV watershed is that this is the time that, for many decades, has been considered best for well-behaved children in a well-run home to be in bed, ready for school the next day. A majority of those reading this will have memories, from either side of the age divide, of negotiations over staying up a bit longer.

But the watershed required parental discipline and presence. So, ever since the 1960s, when Mrs Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers and Listeners Association became the most feared and effective lobbyists in the history of British broadcasting, moralists have raised the spectacle of child viewers in an empty home vacated by working or feckless parents. Or, as became a fashion from the 1980s onwards, of younger family members having their own sets in their bedrooms.

As a result, Mrs Whitehouse and her successors, supported by sympathisers in the press, attempted to impose a sort of mezzanine-watershed, in which the most contentious scenes were screened long after 9pm, rather than a free-for-all beginning the moment that the clock-hands formed the necessary right-angle. And, indeed, Ofcom regulations do suggest a gradual introduction of tougher stuff and pre-broadcast warnings will often flag up that a show contains sex or swearing "from the outset".

It is futile now, though, to imagine, as Cameron and Bailey apparently do, a kindly but stern mum or dad murmuring "time to turn in now, Johnny" as the slaying, swearing or shagging counts begins to rise. We can do it – I have done it – but each small victory for intervention is likely to be surrounded by waves of daily defeats we never know about, through the multiplicity of other media.

As injuncting celebrities have discovered, democratising digital technology is essentially uncensorable. In the case of TV shows, because so many children have their own computers and phones and numerous friends who also will, the only effective way to control youthful viewing would be to conduct the sort of surveillance operation undertaken by Robert De Niro's retired CIA agent in Meet the Fockers, a title that itself celebrates the general liberation of mainstream entertainment.

It would be necessary not only to maintain a fearsome regime of PIN-protection and random checks on hard drives but also to ensure that our offspring only associated with people whose guardians were equally beady. Forget watersheds: this is a vision of a parent-child relationship that is more like waterboarding.

And, even in the areas of conventional scheduled broadcasting that can be subjected to time-sensitivity, there is the difficulty of judging what public taste is. Coincidentally, there has been a separate campaign in recent days for radio to become subject to a watershed. For reasons that presumably came from the perception that visual images are more threatening than audio – a view perhaps rooted in the history of pornography – the wireless was never given a moral clock-face in the way that the box was.

But now, seeking to make the case for a child-adult barrier in radio, the Mail on Sunday and Daily Mail have severely criticised the BBC for broadcasting on The News Quiz, a lunchtime show, a joke in which Sandi Toksvig accused the Conservative party of having "put the 'n' into the word 'cuts'".

In the right-leaning press, this gag, and a BBC executive's defence of it, have been cited, in language very reminiscent of Shapiro's book, as evidence of a radicalising liberal elite in control of broadcasting, who will not rest until the language now expected of rappers becomes acceptable from vicars. These potty-mouthed leftists are accused of trying to smuggle taboo words into a genteel wireless series.

Yet, proving the complexity of these disputes, the word complained of was spoken in far less disguise on another Radio 4 show several years ago by a performer routinely described as a national treasure. During the "new words" round on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, Stephen Fry neologised "countryside" as "the murder of Piers Morgan". The audience laughter greeting this explicit pun on a generally unspeakable expletive includes what sounds like the full-throated roar of Middle England's approval.

And, even apart from such anomalies of reaction, a radio watershed would be as pointless as the television one in attempting to prevent the spread of the gag, which was easily available online any time a listener wanted to hear it.

Both cases demonstrate that the problem with all attempts at moral enforcement in broadcasting now is that they are based on an out-dated model of viewing and listening: of a family sitting round a TV set or wireless, switching on a programme at the time the programme-makers decided. Obsessed with times on the clock, the clean-up campaigners need to pay more attention to the date.
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Monday 6 June 2011

The Game Of Sexual Politics

While HBO hasn't shied away from the abundant sex in the Game of Thrones books (even amping it up), the presence of rape within George R.R. Martin's novels has been nearly eliminated. Jace Lacob examines why sex and violence, but not sexual violence, has played out on the show—and why some viewers and critics are angry...

When HBO announced that it would be adapting George R.R. Martin's bestselling fantasy novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, as the television drama Game of Thrones, it seemed like a perfect match. Not beholden to advertisers or the FCC, HBO has the freedom to push the boundaries of content, and its depiction of a power-hungry feudal society has been sensational, highly sexual, and ultra-violent. Martin's novels take place within a brutal world where war, death, and all manner of sexual impulses are commonplace. But while HBO hasn't shied away from the sex (in fact, they've amped it up), Game of Thrones skirts the presence of rape within Martin's novels. While readers wade through sex, violence, and even sexual assault as part of the ruthlessness of Martin's fictional world, television audiences can seemingly only handle two out of three.

Let's back up a minute. Game of Thrones has been a ratings success for HBO and has already been renewed for a second season. But as a few critics have remarked, the show often goes for the groin instead of the head. The books provide a powder keg of sexuality, yet producers have injected even more sex into the mix, introducing, for instance, a provocative lesbian scene into the May 29 episode that didn't appear in the source material, as Aidan Gillen's Peter "Littlefinger" Baelish "auditioned" two new whores for his brothel and delivered a monologue while watching them indulge each other with varying degrees of arousal.


For some critics, that episode was a turning point: it appeared to cross a line in a show that has already been overflowing with sex scenes between lovers, johns and whores, and even siblings. (Cersei and Jaime, I'm looking at you.) Those who were turned off didn't like the gratuitousness of the sequence, coining such terms as "sexposition" and "whorexposition" about the way in which story had been slipped into a sex scene rather than vice-versa.

AOLtv critic Maureen Ryan took the producers to task. "Sometimes Game of Thrones uses sexual scenes to shed light on character," wrote Ryan. "But quite often, it shows naked women because it can. At times, the show appears to be trying to cover up clunky exposition with naked flesh, and at other moments, the vibe comes off as, 'Hey! It's HBO! Here are some boobs!' Sigh." And academic Myles McNutt, who devised the "sexposition" terminology, wrote on his blog, "The show is really letting Littlefinger become his own character, and that scene is an important part of giving him agency... but any real symbolism is lost amidst the moaning." Others had more visceral reactions. After last week's episode, Salon and New York Times writer Laura Miller tweeted, "OK, the sexual attitude of the Game of Thrones TV series (and its promo [material]) is now officially creeping me out."

While frank sex in HBO shows is common (just look at True Blood), Game of Thrones appears to be placing it front and center, as though the only way to make exposition-heavy bits like these interesting was to couch them in terms of sexuality. There's been a litany of such scenes: Harry Lloyd's Viserys recounts his family's sordid history to a pleasure slave astride him in the bathtub; Alfie Allen's Theon offers a full-frontal view of his manhood after having sex with a prostitute; there's Peter Dinklage's Tyrion, abed with multiple whores in the series opener; and a scene between Emilia Clarke's Daenerys and her handmaiden turns into a steamy lesbian-tinged sex training sequence.

But if Game of Thrones is having its cake with Martin's sexed up fantasy drama, and eating it too, by adding even more nudity to the mix, the adaptation has not been faithful to the source material as far as rape goes—sexual assault is persistent, disturbing, and occurs often within Martin's novels. But that also demonstrates, perhaps, a key underlying difference between written and visual entertainment. The instances of rape within Martin's novels are distressing for the readers because they're experienced via the characters' innermost thoughts (as in the case of Daenerys), or are described second-hand. But that's not possible in a television setting, where the action does—and must—unfold before our eyes.

The one rape of many from the novel that remains in the HBO adaptation is that of Emilia Clarke's Daenerys, who has been aged up from a 13-year-old in the book to a 16-year-old, who is raped by her warlord husband on her wedding night. "It's ground that you have to tread carefully on," said Executive Producer D.B. Weiss, speaking to The Daily Beast in March. "It's not our world but it is a real world, and it's a violent world, a more brutal world… It's a world where these horrible things are definitely pervasive elements of their lives and their cultures. We felt that shying away from these things would be doing a disservice to the reality and groundedness of George's vision."

The most recent episode on Sunday, its eighth, makes it abundantly clear that producers are still holding back when it comes to rape, even if they're willing to indulge in not only massive amounts of sex, but violence, too. (Witness the beheadings of several characters, including a horse, the slaying of a beloved pet, and the evisceration of a character this week.) In the novel on which the first season of Game of Thrones is based, the sequence within Sunday's episode is a nightmarish one, as Dothraki invaders rape multiple women before Daenerys (Clarke) puts a stop to their abhorrent behavior. Here, however, the scenes play out with the intangible threat of rape (the "spoils of war") hanging over the heads of the female POWs, who are shoved around and put in pens. Given the forcible consummation of Daenerys' own wedding, it seems a strange about-face in a show that hasn't shied away from other kinds of brutality.

But pulling back on the depiction of rape is a good thing for viewers. And those who haven't enjoyed the sexed-up elements of the show can find relief in knowing that the show is treading carefully in other areas. By aging up Daenerys, by eliminating the en masse rape of the Dothraki prisoners, it enables Game of Thrones to be much less harrowing, keeping the horror restricted to the supernatural realm. When asked back in March about the prominence of sexual assault within his novels, Martin disagreed with the assessment that rape is pervasive in the books ("I don't think I ever have any on-stage rapes," he said), and was quick to point out that, in the case of Daenerys' wedding night, marital rape is a modern-day concept that held no sway over Dark Ages gender politics, or indeed over Westerosi laws.

"In a medieval society, there was no such thing as marital rape," said Martin. "Marital rape is a conception that just came out of the [Oregon v.] Rideout case… Even in British common-law and all that, it was thought that you cannot have rape within marriage and that's been the law for thousands of years of history. I am not endorsing it, mind you, but let me make it clear here: I am glad we have evolved to the point that we have but I am not writing about 21st-century America. I'm writing about a quasi-medieval society, which had very different standards on these issues."

Clarke felt that the violence against her highborn character, sold into marriage with a Dothraki warlord, strengthened Daenerys. "Because we're looking at it from a modern vantage point, it's much, much more shocking," said Clarke. "If you look at the way that women have been treated from medieval times until now, there's a huge change… But the wonderful thing about Daenerys is that she is a brilliant feminist character because she overcomes all of these things, even in a time when those kinds of monstrosities were considered normal." (It's also worth pointing out that Daenerys herself could be a feudal victim of Stockholm Syndome: she falls in love with her captors and specifically her rapist husband, sympathizing with the Dothraki until she becomes one of them in speech, dress, and attitude.)

Martin, meanwhile, said that within the novels, the men committing acts of rape aren't depicted as noble or good. One particularly sadistic character, Gregor Clegane, is infamous for his atrocious acts of violence and rapine, spinning a story in the series second novel, A Clash of Kings, that would turn the stomachs of even the most unemotional readers.

But that's the point, Martin would argue: despite its omnipresence within the world of Game of Thrones, rape is never acceptable behavior embraced by anyone with a shred of decency within them. Which fits into the overall philosophy of Martin's novels: bad things happen to good people, and bad people often get away with the blackest of deeds. "Gregor Clegane is one of the least sympathetic characters in the books," said Martin. "He's as close as you come to absolute evil, I suppose, although even then I try to give him some motivations and some reasons for him being the way he is. I don't want to write about orks… who are just born evil."
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TV Industry Weakening The 9pm Watershed?

David Cameron has threatened curbs on sexualisation of childhood as a review calls on parents to hold media to account. Programmers are actively working against parents by effectively abolishing the TV watershed, the Bailey review into the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood has found.

The strength of the condemnation will put pressure on the culture minister Ed Vaizey to ask Ofcom, the industry regulator, to reinstate a tighter definition of the 9pm watershed. The review calls on parents to redouble efforts to hold the relevant industries to account, saying there is a disconnect between the degree of concern among the public and the disregard of many businesses over the issues.

Cameron hailed the report as "a giant step forward for protecting childhood and making Britain more family friendly". He has given the media and retail industry 18 months to show demonstrable progress – or he will consider regulation. He will also host a summit in October in Downing Street to monitor the progress made since publication of the report.


Various industry bodies rushed out new codes, including the British Retail Consortium, or said they will be setting up expert advisory panels, such as the Advertising Association.

The BRC said George, Next, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and Tesco are among the firms that have signed a code, which promises "fabrics and cuts should provide for modesty", and "slogans and imagery must be age appropriate and without undesirable associations or connections … suggestive, demeaning, derogative or political material".

Cameron is aware that the report, published on Monday, largely focuses on stronger voluntary self-regulation by the music, retail, magazine, television and advertising industries.

The review conducted by Reg Bailey, the chief executive of the Mothers' Union, finds "broadcasters are at times actively working against parents. Some parents have expressed a good degree of disappointment that the traditionally trusted control of the television 'watershed' appears to be less strictly observed than in the past. Some parents even questioned whether the watershed still exists."

Bailey reported "many broadcasters regarded the watershed as relevant for primary school age children and that once children are old enough to be able to choose the programmes they watch, then they are also mature enough to enjoy stronger content in the later part of the pre-watershed period".

Bailey argued "Parents do not accept that if a variety show features a pop musician with a reputation for delivering highly sexualised performances that the broadcaster has a licence to sail as close to the edge of compliance as possible.

"The onus is on the broadcaster to show acceptable content in the first place, not to react to the audience complaints after the event."

Cameron highlighted the plan for a single, user-friendly website that "sets out simply and clearly what parents can do if they feel a programme, advertisement, product or service is inappropriate for their children". He said it would be easy to implement.

Bailey warned: "Society has become increasingly full of sexualised imagery. This has created a wallpaper to children's lives. Parents feel there is no escape and no clear space where children can be children. I want to put the power back in parents' hands so they can better manage the pressures on their children and make it easier for them to bring up their children the way they want."

An Ofcom spokesman said: "Protection of children is one of Ofcom's most important statutory duties and we therefore welcome Reg Bailey's review of this significant area.

"The watershed works and we rigourously enforce it. As suggested by the review, we will continue to focus on exploring parents' views in our enforcement of broadcasting standards relating to the protection of children".
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