...to stop Jonathon Ross from swearing on TV, is to simply not allow him back on the air.

That's all we need. Jonathon Ross back on TV, even if he's not swearing

“And now on BBC 2, Martin Scorcese’s Badfellas, which has been specially ruined for television”

“Did you fun my wife ?”

“No I didn’t fun your wife”

“Fun you, you muddy funster”

“Suck my cake, you cake-sucker”

“Suck my lozenge”

If the bad language goes what else can Johnathan Ross do?

Paris because JR probably has done her as well

Is this a case of Aunty becomming Nanny?

Ross was on well after the watershed. If you don't like his style there is magic button people can press, its called "OFF". Why do these people bother if they know they are going to be offended?

Pass the coat - mines the one with "how to swear in 20 different languages" in the pocket.

I only watch the BBC to see some decent f***ing swearing so if they're going to f***ing cut it back, I'll stop f***ing bothering!! I remember once they showed a "decency dubbed" version of Robocop with all the swearing replaced by harmless words like "freaking" and "airhead" and so forth, it was hilarious but also rather puritanical!

What next? Nothing but endless Eastenders reruns on the BBC?? It's quite sad...I'm not a big swearer myself but I don't see any harm in it (except the word c*** which I just dislike) and if it entertains??? hmmmm

Mines the one with the starched white collar attached and the buckle hat hanging next to it

can we just have no jonathan ross instead, what a talentless clucking funt he is.

rossy was on lily allen's show and it was embarrassing to hear how much swearing they could both get out. yeah, it would be bad enough to be on her show, but it was like a sponsored swearing competition, as if they were trying to be 'street'.

and i'm no fucking prude, but the gwyneth paltrow comment was a bit much (although very true)

The entire "Manuelgate" saga is out of hand. Now the Beeb anounce this new policy of reducing swearing.. So what? .. Our young folk are killing each other in the streets... Our way of life is constantly under threat from religious extremism and the bl**dy BBC is worried over offending some "precious" actor and reducing the intances of good old anglo saxon...For Christs sake get a little perspective !!!

ihope they dont start bleeping out on the comedy stuff like mock the week!

"has got a rather limited existance?"

Ever seen the South Park episode 'It Hits The Fan"? The ancient Knights of Standards and Practices will be along shortly at this sudden increase in the use of cursed words...

And so, just like the aftermath of the Hutton Report, the BBC again agrees to lose any edge it once had in a desperate bid to remain so inoffensive that people continue to pay for it.

I bloody love the license fee (40p a day for all this?) but if the BBC keeps having to shy away from doing anything even slightly controvertial or testing then I really don't see the point. They're supposed to have the freedom to say things that aren't necessarily popular, now we're all going to end up run by bloody advertisers.

(And no, I'm not referring specifically to the Ross/Brand crap. Every now and then they go over the line and should apologise, but they shouldn't have their wings clipped so much they can only walk)

Yes, too much fucking is annoying, but you have to be sensible about it.

This morning they had to apologise when David Walliams said 'shag'. Shag pile? fine. Shag tobacco? fine. Shag a seabird? Fine. Shag a person? No, sorry... we'll have to apologise for that one...

Not that I give a toss about Ross / Brand-Gate, but to be honest it was starting to seem like, "Ooh look at me. I said a naughty word. Aren't I edgy and cool".

Maybe I'm getting too old, but Stephen Fry strikes me as an excellent of example of someone who can entertain without having to return to the playground.

Now I'm off for a mug of cocoa and a nice lie down... :-)

I've paid my TV licence, I expect to see full and varied use of all the wonderfully colourful aspects in the English language.

I see they're playing the "won't somebody think of the children?" card. There are very few "mainstream" expletives that I know now that I didn't already know and use at the age of 7. Albeit I'd never use them in from of the parents (at age 7, I mean ... now it's a different story). Which seems a tad ironic, my 7 year oldness censoring himself for the benefit of his parents -- "won't somebody think of the ... parents?"

In closing, 25 years of swearing hasn't done me any cunting harm.

Needs to get a f*cking life...

needs their fucking head examining.

Get

A

Life

should come on and tell anyone who doesn't like swearing to f**k off.

Seriously, if you don't like it, don't watch it. Just don't complain and ruin fun stuff for the rest of us who don't give a s**t about a bit of swearing.

C**ts

It's a fairly well know colloquialism for that even worse euphemism "make love to".

So what happened to free speech? The BBC is funded by the taxpayer in a supposed country of free speech...yet they do not allow their entertainers this freedom! Why are they paying the likes of Woss and Brand all this money if they then tell them what to do???

Am I the only one who actually found what those two did funny? Mr Sachs was rude enough not to turn up on their show after being invited. Brand did indeed previously sh@g Sachs' grand-daughter so he never actually lied about anything!

What's the f*cking g*d D@mn motherf*cking problem with this c*nting government and it's agencies? Britain has lost it's sense of humour, it's banks, it's terrorists have even b*ggered off to India!! Is there anything left for us to enjoy or shall we all just move to Bridgend?

BEEEEEEEP!

Why do swear words have to be justified? You hear them all the time late at night and in the pub. Surely a warning would suffice saying that the following program may contain swearing the same as violent and sexual scenes are warned about before films.

"Shag a seabird? Fine" - er, thats beastiality and is only fine on Four. !!

Suprised expression or one of contentment ?

don't mind the swearing - its the leftie bias and the licence fee I object to

“Suck my lozenge”

Icon says it all.

For years I never knew the BBC had cut Spaceballs as I hadn't seen it in the cinema, only found out when I bought the DVD and discovered when Dark Helmet goes to turn off the autodestruct and finds a note tagged "out of order" and says "Fuck! Even in the future nothing works!". Along with cutting the combing the desert "We ain't found shit!" and the "I'm surrounded by assholes" section shortened.

Actually I'm suprised they didn't retitle it "Spacesphericals", those muddy funsters...

"Am I the only one who actually found what those two did funny?"

nope, i thought it was hilarious and exactly what brand does everyweek, yes, he's a naughty boy, but that is what he does. everyone should go and find it and have a listen, pure comedy, as long as you understand what brand's humour is.

good to see andrew sachs furthering his career by appearing as manuel at the Prince Charles gig the other week, the silly, sad old turkey.

Some time in the distant past my daughter said that she didn't like Eastenders as it wasn't real.

"No one even says 'Bloody' ". She'd seen and heard her parents having mild disagreements over petty things and knew that no decent row is without a few choice words (she's now studying English).

How many fights have been in the Queen Vic with no-one going "Come on then, let's fuckin' 'ave you". Not ever a 'tosser' or 'wanker' - both mainstays of East End culture. Will we end up getting rid of Bill Shakespeare's stuff about 'purses' and 'daggers' ?

...you'll likely find that most people don't give a hoot about the swearing. Its true that if its placed in a strategic way in a sentence, then it can warrant a chuckle.

Ross and Brand are on significant BBC wages, and they sit in their offices prior to the shows and write f**k, s**t and c**t (only in special circumstances on c**t you understand) down on a script and call it comedy. It really isn't!!

Now if they write a truly awesome piece of comedy and throw in a swear word or two to enhance it, then all the better.

Anybody here used to watch 'Whos line is it anyway?' with neckless Clive Anderson prior to when the US took it on and cocked it up. Not a swear word to be heard (99.99% of the time) and had me literally in stitches. To me, Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, and Greg Proops made that show.

Goes to show that swearing has very little impact on true comedy.

>So what happened to free speech?

The people who valued it didn't stand up to the authoritarian kill-joy 'I don't like it so no-one else should have it' types.

They even replaced Scumbag with Crumb-bag. It was after 9.00 I thinkm I can hand;e the word scum!

Seriously though, If you don't like swearing don't watch it! Lifes too short to be offended by words.

Can one say camel's toe on the BBC? Front bottom?

I don't want Charlie Brooker beeped at 10:30 at night on a channel with about three viewers.

article> the Andrew Sachs "Manuelgate" scandal also passed judgement on Ross's chat-up line to the US thesp

There isn't much about his present nationality I could confirm quickly, but apparently he was born German and immigrated to England (still German? See http://www.filmreference.com/film/29/Andrew-Sachs.html). Surprised me...

"Mr Sachs was rude enough not to turn up on their show after being invited."

Did he accept the invitation and then just not show up? If not, then I suggest you look up the distinction between "invited" and "ordered".

I watch the BBC every night, a tally up all the swear words then I write a complaint to OFCOM!!!! - I don't really.

Now the Internet reports the news faster than the new papers can, the papers need to find something to write about, so they go after the BBC because everyone pays for the service. The BBC will never win with the papers taking chunks out of them,

But I do agree Ross does swear a lot, I sometimes feel really uncomfortable watching him!

I swear freely and liberally (interesting but true choice of words) on a daily basis. But that doesn't mean I swear all the time or don't know any other words. Shock is often used to raise ratings and it can sometimes be pretty annoying if you have people apparently swearing just for the sake of it. But the BBC should be representative of everyone out there including the denizens of John Cooper Clark's immortal "Chicken Town" aka Salford. Middle England can fuck right off.

Lacking much in the way of brain cells, it's not surprising that Ross has thus far proved incapable of producing one original thought or one original sentence. An overpaid talentless adolescent, he (and the similarly puerile Brand) have benefited solely from the presence of so many other overpaid talentless adolescents in what passes for the BBC's production management structure.

It is from them that the cfry has gone up "we need Ross, we need Brand, to capture the yoof market".

And it is from the BBC's own newly published stats that the truth emerges: less than 20% of Ross's audience is aged under 25, and Brand's audience totalled 1/15th of that attained by fuddy ol' "Today".

In pursuit of the self-serving delusion that hey, we're young! We must be important! the Beeb's adolescent retards have been responsible for the epic waste of licence payers' money and the perpetuation of the myth that employing the likes of Ross and Brand is somehow "good" for national broadcasting.

That the inarticulate and immature Ross is to be allowed to get his snout back in the licence payers' trough says all there is to say about the failure of the publicly funded national broadcasting organisation. It's no longer a case of the sooner Ross goes the better but the sooner the better that the BBC's access to public funds is cut off. With the kind of ratings Brand was getting, no commercial outfit would've stumped up his salary, and for the kind of audience Ross is allegedly satisfying, only an outfit catering to morons on benefits would seek to employ him -- though where they'd find commercial advertisers wishing to target that particular audience profile, Gawd knows. But perhaps Ross could do it on Minimum Wage.

As for the earlier remark about Andrew Sachs being a silly sad old turkey, at least he's a turkey the nation took to its heart, unlike the Ross species that seeks to take everyone else into the gutter.

Yes Jonathan, I would too. Not expecting Cold Play to appear on your show next year, though.

Paris because JR and I probably would. Me first 'cos I don't like stirring someone else's porridge...

Oh, you were not eating, were you?

I'd like to know why swearing is already censored from the music on BBC radio but not TV. It's not just F-bombs either. The other week I heard Colin Murray (so after 10pm) playing Helicopter by Bloc Party and it had "bastard" wiped out of the lyrics - completely ridiculous. I'm sure that BBC TV has swearing aplenty at that time of night. Why the double-standards?

"Is this a case of Aunty becomming Nanny?"

That's all very well but why should we have to pay (through the license fee) for something that we don't want to hear?

Jonathan Woss is a tw*t anyway. All he does is swear and laugh at "rude words". If he ever said anything genuinely funny, I must have missed it.

I bet he was the first to look up f*ck and b*stard when he got his first dictionary and pissed himself. Most of us got past that stage before we left school.....

Radio doesn't have a watershed - technically, you should never swear on it.

The US bit is referring to Gwynneth Paltrow, not Andrew Sachs. I had to read this twice before it dawned.

However, my main complaint is the money paid to Mr. Ross (and many of teh other BBC "talent").

£6,000,000 per year is a lot of money. I am pretty sure you could replace Ross with someone on only £1 million and still be guaranteed on getting someone talented, popular and entertaining.

£5 million would allow the exemption from the license fee of another 35,000 low income families, which should surely be a much better use of what is effectively my money than paying a single person, IMHO for £6 million quid of taxpayers money I would expect the BBC to employ Princess Diana.

So nobody at the BBC got it when he told Nigella Lawson she was "#1 on his list of MILFs" a year ago ?

It's terrible seeing the BBC dying like this bit by bit until it's just amorphous shit like the US channels. It would have been nice if the BBC could have survived into the internet era but it's just not to be.

Now I suppose I have no entitlement to an opinion, as I long ago used the ultimate OFF button and so don't have a telly, this its not my money they are spending.

Nevertheless, how about a radical experiment?

Ban ALL swearing on ALL broadcast media for a period of one year. At the end of that time, see whether people are still actually aware that there is no swearing.

I suggest this because I don't swear (no, not even when it slips out) (old Round the Horne joke, hence completely clean and smutty at the same time). People never believe this, "Oh, come on, everybody swears", but when challenged have to admit I do not.

Why not? Just never have.

What this says to me is that swearing is so much a part of many peoples daily failure of communication, that they are not even aware that it is there - or not!

The icon? Shhhh you know what.

"Ever seen the South Park episode 'It Hits The Fan"? The ancient Knights of Standards and Practices will be along shortly at this sudden increase in the use of cursed words..."

Yes I have (here in the US on Comedy Central.) The first airing on Comedy Central was completely unbleeped (they bleep a couple f-bombs but say shit all 162 times). People where shocked. SHOCKED! Actually they surprisingly weren't, there's still strict rules against swearing on the air here (see George Carlin's "7 dirty words") but recently they aren't much enforced. In general, stations are much stricter than they have to be (since the law's pretty ambiguous most stations don't want to risk a theoretically possible large fine.) Since they swear so much, this dragon like bursts out of some mountain hideaway and starts trashing the town. As Wikipedia says, :"Kyle destroys the dragon with an ancient magical rune stone belonging to a knight in the mystical Order of Standards & Practices."

Firstly there will be a lot less swearing coming out Jonathan Ross's gob next year as he wont be working with the Beeb for the next 6 months. Although I think the BBC should stop messing around with the licence payers money and sack this loser (does anyone actually watch his show anyway?? Ant and Dec are far more popular any day than Ross, and the Auntie handed them over to ITV along with Paul O'Grady - all top quality comedians that ITV probably pay a lot less for than the BBC pay for Ross).

The BBC does have some really good and funny comedians out there such as Chris Moyles, but Jonathan Ross is just a waste of space and a waste of the TV licence payers money. I am really annoyed that I am being forced to subscribe to this losers pay packet just because I own a TV and live in the UK.

I have an idea for a simple technological solution.

Whenever the sound of a swear-word is broadcast, it should be in opposite phases in the left-hand and right-hand channels. If you set your TV sound to mono, then the two will cancel out. It'll probably fuck up the rest of the sound effects, of course, but the sort of people at whom this is aimed probably don't care about that as long as they get to don't have to listen to swear words. If you leave it on stereo, then you will hear it as it was intended.

I think everyone should be happy with that -- unless they only have an old telly with only mono sound .....

No, not eating. And thankfully not drinking either; else you would owe me a new monitor and keyboard. thanks for the laugh!

I see that Channel 4's PC thought-police have been at the Freeview EPG - my PVR recorded "The Devil's Whore" with the mysteriously censored filename "The Devil's Wh**e.rec".

Back in the 80s Russ Abbot used to get away with "Miss Funny Fanny" and Friar Tuck spoonerism jokes on a Saturday tea-time. I don't seem to remember anyone being offended back then.

If you don't like Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross you can do what I do and avoid any show with either overpaid prat (except the HIGNFY where Ross gets humiliated, of course).

I'm a big fan of his radio show but dont like his TV show mainly because of his unnecessary swearing.

He has many faults but he isn't talentless. He has a very solid knowledge of TV, film and especially music. He researches most of his guests' work in depth and has often seen them live. He mixes inane banter with a good discussion of the work the guest is trying to market (well on his radio show he gets the balance right).

Overpaid? Yes. Needs bringing back to earth. Maybe. But he's good and deserves to be back in some form.

- is that Ross et al will move to ITV etc, where they start f-ing swearing at 1 min past 9...

Somewhere, deep underground, a smug grin is spreading across the corpse of Mary Whitehouse.

Also, I can't believe that Gabby Logan had to appologise on Five Live for Frank Skinner saying "Bitch" on Sunday morning. She cited the new rules on swearing as the reason. Soon, all we'll be getting on the BBC, will be re-runs of Ballamory 24x7.

***"The BBC does have some really good and funny comedians out there such as Chris Moyles"***

ROFLMFAO, Moyles, a "good and funny comedian". Nice to see that irony isn't dead!

He's tops even Ross in the overpaid waste-of-space league table, by quite a margin, IMHO.

Constant swearing does lead to increased violence. How?

In a normal conversation, as it escalates to punches being thrown, you hear in stages

1) normal conversation, 2) raised voices, 3) abuse+raised voices 4) fight!

At any stage before 4 the situation can be defused by someone backing off, or sidetracking the argument.

If you go to a club and have to shout over music you're already at 2. If you swear without realizing it you're effectively at 3. That only leaves a trigger being needed to get to 4. Just add alcohol or chemical recreation of choise to remove inhibitions.

anyhoo, that's my theory...

Pretty sure that was on ITV.

At least it explains Eastenders, where everyone is permanently at 3 and go to 4 at the drop of a rating.

I can't believe that in a discussion about offensive language, anyone would be insensitive enough, or stupid enough, to come on here and say "Chris Moyles".

That is just so-oo DISGUSTING.

Why not just stay in your playground and swear at all the other kiddies to your hearts content? Adults don't need a constant diet of swearing. And no swearing isn't big, clever or particularly funny - its the last resort of the washed up comedian to get a few cheap laughs. If their act doesn't work without it perhaps they should bin the act and try another career, Or just stick to doing the student union circuit.

FNORD!

I couldn't care less how much swearing is on TV after the watershed. Children ought to be in bed by then (although I rarely was), or doing something else (huffing glue, perhaps?). As to the old and easily offended... Well, if that game of bridge and half bottle of port hasn't finished them off, I think they deserve every-fucking-thing they get.

There are far more important issues in the world than a bit of swearing on TV.

How about the TV and advertising companies clamp down on bad grammar on TV? THAT is far more damaging and upsetting than the odd "fuck."

Quite right, ban swearing on the BBC so we can all look forward to less fights in nightclubs...

Actually I agree with you to an extent, swearing can be aggressive and aggression does lead to fights. However, I really don't think less swearing on the BBC is going to have any impact on the amount people swear. My three year old only ever watches Teletubbies and the like and he never stops fucking swearing.

With JR absent from the BBC for a few months, ITV could have given him an all expenses paid trip to Australia, where a certain reality show for misbehaving celebs (what other term would you use to describe the likes of Kilroy and Mallet?) is currently airing...

...it would be even better if they could conveniently forget to arrange his flight back...

"The BBC does have some really good and funny comedians out there such as Chris Moyles"

he really isn't,

just, no....

So, Johnny Woss reckons he'd like to "make love" to Gwynneth Paltrow. He has a point but I suspect the wife might have something to say about it...

There - I said it without fucking swearing.

If we're going to sent that offensive tw@ all the way to oz... can't we get him on some program where he goes diving for sting rays?

(No offence to Mr Urwin; rather a much preferred alternative... RIP mate)