Not in front of the adults

You might think that, at the moment, the television regulator Ofcom doesn't know whether it's coming or going on the question of whether it's permissible to speak on TV the slang words for, well, coming and going. This week it turned down complaints about the use of the F-word in The Catherine Tate Christmas Special, but, a few days earlier, had forced the BBC to make a long on-screen apology for sexual and scatological language during the Live Earth concerts.

Viewers may well wonder, according to taste, what the fuck is going on or, alternatively, what the f**k is going on? reports Mark Lawson.

But this confusion reflects a state of flux (always a word to be spoken carefully by broadcasters) on the question of what can be said in public. Fifty years ago, the broadcasting rules on language followed those of what was appropriately called polite society. Only dockers, soldiers or lovers at their most privately Lawrentian used the taboo words without an apprehension of scandal. And so the standards of the drawing room and of the television sets that increasingly stood in those rooms were a perfect reflection of each other.

Through the 60s and 70s, this alliance of propriety gradually broke down. After Lady Chatterley's corsets were loosened by the courts and the Lord Chamberlain's blue pencil was removed from British theatre, plays in particular tested television's linguistic prissiness. An essay by David Hare recalls sitting with the BBC head of drama in the Windmill pub on Clapham Common in the mid-70s and negotiating broadcastable oaths in a conversation that included the gambit: "I'll swap you two buggers for a shit."

It's appropriate that this farcical bartering took place on licensed premises because, even 30 years ago, words would have been in use at the neighbouring tables that made the dramatic dialogue under discussion seem mild. And, today, the tongue ties of television are as distinct from wider society as a convent in the grounds of a barracks.

Many people under 30 now speak a dialogue that Tom Wolfe has called "fuck patois", in which every other word is some variation of copulatory or genital slang, although spoken not with sexual meaning or, indeed, any meaning. In some quarters, words once thought appalling have replaced "um" and "er" as a pause for collecting thought.

Travelling recently with children on a train, I was sitting in front of a young woman on a mobile who was either an actress practising a speech from a David Mamet play or who just talked dirty all the time. Because she was a quarter of my size, I felt safe in asking her to tone down the torrent. It was only when she said, "Sorry, mum, some fucker's interrupting," that I realised she was speaking to her mother, which, looking back, made even more extraordinary the number of times she had used the C-word about her sister.

So, now that which used to be called bad language is standard in large areas of daily life, there's clearly a case for broadcasting to relax its own bans. This has certainly happened, and yet the rules seem confused. Foul-mouthed contestants in The Apprentice (9pm, BBC1) are not bleeped, and yet a potty-mouthed comedian on The Lily Allen Show (10.30pm, BBC3) was, when logic suggests the opposite policy.

There are other confusions. Strikingly, in refusing the Catherine Tate complaints, the watchdog ruled that words are no more offensive on Christmas Day than on any other date, a refutation of the traditional television view that swearing on Good Friday was worse than on October 5. And yet, paradoxically, time of day does still seem to matter. The severe sanctions against Live Earth seem to have resulted from the fact that it was transmitted largely before the notional children's bedtime - "the watershed" - of 9pm. And much of the sensitivity over what can come out of mouths on television results from the assumed risk of corrupting innocence.

There are some BBC executives, for example, who argue that programmes should be more cautious during school holidays because of the greater risk of younger ears being stung. But, as students at private and public academies are only educated for about half the year, and that half does not always overlap with state holidays, such infantilising of the schedules would become the dominant tone.

But the flaw in such age-related regulation is that everyday evidence suggests that younger viewers and listeners will be more used to - and less offended by - profanity than their seniors. It would actually make more sense to swap the Edwardian injunction of "not in front of the children" for greater care about what goes out when adults are around. The people the system is protecting from certain words really don't give one about them.