Britbox, PBS, and Pusillanimous Prissiness

Tony Robinson as Baldrick and Rowan Atkinson as Ebenezer Blackadder
in “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol”

Curmie and Beloved Spouse have watched “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol” at least once every December for well over a decade. Often the “ritual viewing” takes place on Christmas Eve, as it did this year. Needless to say, we know the roughly half-hour show pretty well. We have two versions of the piece on DVD. One is a stand-alone which we always seem to forget is configured for British players and won’t work on ours (we could play it on a computer, but we’d naturally rather have the larger screen of the television). 

We couldn’t immediately find the other one (it’s in a box set of the entire Blackadder series), so we decided to stream it on Britbox. A couple minutes in, Ebenezer Blackadder’s dogsbody Baldrick is describing the workhouse nativity play, for which the infant scheduled to play the baby Jesus had died, leaving the players no choice but to have the role enacted by Spot the dog.

Ebenezer: Oh, dear… I’m not convinced that Christianity would have established its firm grip over the hearts and minds of mankind if all Jesus had ever said was “Woof.”

Baldrick: Well, it went all right until the shepherds came on. See, we hadn’t been able to get any real sheep, so we had to stick some wool…

Ebenezer: …on some other dogs.

Baldrick: Yeah… and the moment Jesus got a whiff of them, he’s away! While the angel’s singing “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Mankind,” Jesus scampers across and tries to get one of the sheep to give him a piggyback ride!

Ebenezer: Scarcely appropriate behavior for the son of God, Mr. Baldrick. Weren’t the children upset?

Baldrick: Nah, they loved it. They want us to do another one at Easter—they want to see us nail up the dog.

But Baldrick’s last speech in this sequence, which we knew well and indeed anticipated, never happened. Apparently there are multiple versions out there—some with and some without the line. (Hey, if you can’t believe Wikipedia, what’s the world coming to?) It seems a strange thing to cut a single line in an often darkly humorous piece of satire, which is what appears to have happened. And why do so at all? Are there a lot of Victorian-era urchins who will rise up in righteous dudgeon at the affront to their true humanitarian natures? The joke is funny, or at least Curmie and Beloved Spouse think so, and even if it weren’t, where’s the problem? It’s not like kids are the series’ target audience. Or are the offended spectators animal activists? Curmie loves dogs as much as the next person, but he knows a joke when he hears one. Either way, how is this line more problematic than Queen Victoria’s calling Prince Albert her “little German sausage”... or Jesus mounting a sheep from behind, for that matter? 

Moreover, it’s hard to believe that Rowan Atkinson (who played the title character) or Stephen Fry (not in this scene, but in two others), both of whom have become somewhat controversial for their ardent defense of free speech, would be very pleased at having their work thus edited.  

It’s also strange that the line is included in some versions and not in others. If it were deemed offensive (or whatever), surely the rights holders would allow the distribution of only the Bowdlerized version. Note: this may have happened, as it’s apparently been some time since the short film has been available in its uncensored form; our copy is several years old. 

But this situation also brings to mind another variation on censorial idiocy. We’re members of the local PBS station, and thereby we have access to a lot of archived material from PBS. It’s important to understand that we’re not talking about over-the-air broadcasts: you have to pay extra to be able to watch this stuff, and membership is specific: it’s not a bundle of things of which the PBS archives are only a single part. But apparently PBS has adopted a policy that those “seven words you can’t say on television” are verboten even on shows that can be viewed only by a self-selecting membership. 

This is especially disturbing for three fundamental reasons. First, they have unartfully clipped out all sound in those moments. Shifting from ambient noise (traffic sounds, almost but not quite inaudible background conversations, the TV on in the next room…) to none calls attention to the omission. If you’re going to censor content, at least don’t advertise the fact. Because you know what offends Curmie, PBS? It’s not when a character mutters an expletive when something goes wrong. It’s your pusillanimous prissiness. 

Which brings us to another point. PBS tries to position itself as a representative of the best in television: “where else can you see [fill in the blank]” is a standard marketing ploy for their fund-raisers. If anyone should be demanding artistic integrity and supporting the aesthetic choices of script-writers, it’s PBS. But they’ve been taken over by a gaggle of hand-wringers who fear that a little old lady from Dubuque might keel over if a character mutters an expletive derived from the Anglo-Saxon when frustrated. You know, like people do? 

Finally, PBS, I’m paying you to present me with authentic work. I expect you to provide me with that. Within the context of a script, it may be perfectly appropriate to have a character use scatological or “obscene” language, or even to use a slur based on race, gender, sexual identity, or the like. That’s a call for the writers, not you to make, and for me, not you, to decide whether to hear what the writers wrote and the actors said. All of these shows, by the way, include a warning about adult content. You don’t watch one of these programs without the expectation of… well… adult content. 

My particular favorites, by the way, are the shows in another language. The ubiquity of the English language comes into play here. Sometimes European characters swear in English; those words are bleeped by PBS. Sometimes they swear in French or German or Swedish or whatever; these lines are censored only in the subtitles. Pssst: nobody tell PBS that a lot of Americans know what “va te faire foutre” means without needing the subtitles, or that a lot of these terms have cognates in English.

Exactly why Britbox (presumably, or maybe the BBC) and PBS see fit to censor their own material from the likes of us eludes me. And don’t get me started on why the bots that control Facebook won’t allow Curmie (or anyone else) to link to a post on this blog: some unspecified “spam” offense, which, of course, never actually happened. Of course, there’s no actual appeal process or indeed a real person to complain to, just sanctimony and self-congratulation. Such is the way of censorious asshats. (The usual nod to Ken White of Popehat for this felicitous phrase.) 

It’s important to note, I think, that these concerns operate on a different axis than the traditional left/right continuum. Rather, this is on the sequence from authoritarianism at one terminus to libertarianism on the other, using the latter in its original sense, which differentiates between actual personal freedom (and unwillingness to be defined by group status) on the one hand and simple selfishness on the other. (Refusal to wear a mask in a pandemic is a function of arrogant stupidity, not libertarianism.) Objections to Blackadder’s line likely come from the left, to those naughty words on PBS from the right, to Curmie’s blog from irrational technophilia. 

I can comprehend a rationale for shutting down objective lies or conspiracy theories (the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia conspiring with the ghost of Hugo Chavez to keep Donald Trump from being re-elected, that sort of crap). But, as Oscar Wilde reminded us, the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Curiously, however, subjective truth is easier to define than objective truth: it’s whatever the creators decided it to be. That includes a cop muttering “shit” when the bad guy gets away.