When is a watershed not a watershed?
Doctor Feelgood has found this story over at the Melon Farmers:
Ofcom has beaten the BBC in a 14-month tussle over the post-watershed screening of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction.
The media regulator decided that 9.10pm on BBC2 was too early to begin transmission of Pulp Fiction, even though this was after the 9pm watershed, because of the seriously offensive language, graphic violence and drug abuse that occur in the first 20 minutes of the film.
So let’s take this bit by bit, shall we?
Pulp Fiction, a film that you really do have to try hard to confuse with any other, was shown after the 9:00pm watershed - the time when family viewing is, by general consensus, over - and on BBC2, the BBC’s minority interest channel.
Which all sounds reasonable enough to me. However…
[Ofcom] agreed with nine viewers who had complained and ruled that the broadcast, on August 7 last year, had breached its programme code on the scheduling of films with strong, adult content.
Nine viewers.
Nine people out of however many thousand that watched the film didn’t understand what ‘watershed’ means and Ofcom agreed with them. This is absolutely ridiculous.
Ofcom have effectively decided that the watershed is now a moving target that can be adjusted on the whim of whatever idiot crawls out from his cave and finds a TV set. The result, of course, will be that programming for adults will be forced to start later and finish earlier until it ceases to exist.
Sunday 30 Oct 2005 | Paul | UK
It was nine viewers out of around one and a half million! This is what I dislike most about Ofcom. If their judgements were based simply on the number of letters through the letterbox, that would be bad enough, because all we would have is Mediawatch simply photocopying one letter a thousand times. However, to completely ignore the level of public dissatisfaction in a judgement is to be blinkered in the extreme.
The other problem I have with this is that Ofcom has hundreds of detailed instructions on exactly how to make all their judgements, yet big issues like ‘what time can an extremely famous and widely-seen film be shown, if it features 18-rated content?’ appear not to have been considered.
The number of complaints is a bit of a side issue. If there actually was a case to answer, then it would be quite reasonable for Ofcom to respond even if only one complaint was raised.
My main objection is that there isn’t a case to answer. The watershed is at 9:00pm. The BBC showed the film after 9:00pm. Case closed.
What is concerning is that Ofcom have arbitarily moved the watershed back to some unspecified time for some vaguely defined set of films. So if Pulp Fiction is shown again at 9:45pm and someone complains, the watershed will be effectively pushed back another half hour, and so on and so on until no films can shown unless they’re safe for six year olds.
The 9:00 watershed is straightforward and easily understood. It’s not up to Ofcom to invent vague extra rules as to how it should be applied.