Perhaps if someone gave us a hint as to where those who are interested can find the Sky broadcast of Titanic? It doesn’t appear to be on our favourite organ inspired site…
Thaddäus Tentakel said:
@JayArgonaut: Just because I’m curious about it: Do you know where the watershed for uncut-broadcasts of such films is? In Germany it’s 8pm for films rated FSK 12, 10pm for FSK 16 and 11pm for FSK 18. Films that are on the index are not allowed to be shown uncut at any time on TV, no matter if it’s 7pm or 3 in the morning. But I’ve no idea how censorship works on British TV.
“Titanic” is a quite good example for that: German afternoon-broadcasts on ProSiebenSAT.1-channels have been cut around 10 minutes, but mostly “violent” scenes (drowning people, Tommy being shot…). Here’s a report with pictures of the missing scenes in the afternoon-broadcasts: http://www.dvd-forum.at/schnittbericht/342-titanic
The UK-broadcasts on 4 I’ve seen showed much more of that violence but in return such things as Fred Fleet screaming “Basterds!” into the phone are missing there. Are there any rules what has to be removed during certain times or is it just up to the TV-stations what they’re doing with their programmes?
Just to be certain that I provide the correct answer on this topic, here’s the broadcasting code as set out by our communications regulator:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/advice-for-consumers/television/what-is-the-watershed
“The watershed begins at 9pm and material unsuitable for children should not, in general, be shown before 9pm or after 5.30am. Unsuitable material can include everything from sexual content to violence, graphic or distressing imagery and swearing. For example, the most offensive language must not be broadcast before the watershed on TV or, on radio, when children are particularly likely to be listening. Frequent use of offensive language must be avoided before the watershed, and must always be justified by its context.”
Nonetheless, I’ve still heard mild profanity during the daytime, such as “bastards” and “bitch” (and not in the context of fatherless children or female dogs 😄 ) and recently one channel that specialises in “classic programming” screened a miniseries that contained repeated utterances of the n-word uncut, way before the watershed. I suppose they were able to justify it in the historical context of the storyline.
In the past, we would sometimes receive an official “Edited for Television” sanitised version of a film with the profanity cleaned up, such as when the BBC used to show the Back to the Future “Son of a Butthead” TV cut. Nowadays, UK channels will just hack up the film themselves. The most annoying situation is when they decide to censor a film - even when it’s being aired way after the watershed, as was the case with the BBC during Xmas when they broadcast The Winter Soldier around 10:30pm but still edited it for violence and language.
If the C4 broadcast turns out to be censored again, which is likely - the best bet appears to be someone tracking down the Sky airing or a capture from Film4 HD (as they’ve shown it post-watershed) by whoever has access to satellite or Virgin Media.
