Who gives a fig about swearing on TV

The Archbishop of Adelaide has his cassock in a twist over bad language on the box. But the real problem is that swear words have lost their power to shock, argues Andrew Billen...

That erudite and precisely spoken quizmaster Robert Robinson used to tell a story about Kenneth Tynan, the first man to use the f-word on British television. A rather grand elderly woman approached him at a party a few weeks after the incident. Tynan feared the worse, but she wanted to thank him. She had, she said, never heard the word before: “But now I use it all the time.”

Forty years on, everybody does, even on television. Anyone who watches Wife Swap will have long since concluded that variations of “fuck” are now the only intensifiers in town. Indeed some people seem to swear more on screen than off. I have never met Gordon Ramsay, but those who have say he rarely swears in private. One of his programmes is called The F Word. Despite the ambiguity that F may stand for food, his catchphrase is “fuck”. In Australia, however, Ramsay's language has sent a bee under the cassock of the Archbishop of Adelaide. Noting that on one show Ramsay used the F-word 80 times, the Most Rev Philip Wilson told a parliamentary inquiry into swearing on television that the episode should never have been aired. The cleric is fighting a rearguard action here, and a rearguard action on two fronts.

The first is a quixotic tilt at the plain fact that swearing, once indulged in mainly by the lower and the upper classes and some intellectuals, is now the lingua franca of the bourgeoisie. What my father called my mother's “kitchen language” is now out in the drawing room. You might say that Australians are fine ones to talk. But the Archbishop is from Adelaide, not for nothing known as the city of churches.

His second battle is to preserve television as a sanctuary inside which people behave better than they do outside. In its early years, television, certainly, was a more formal arena than your average bar. Tynan, when he made history, was discussing censorship. He used the word academically: “I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.” Although the BBC apologised, few rational people would today condemn his usage in that context.

The BBC Producers' Guidelines accept that strong language remains “a subject of deep concern to many people” but adds that “in the right context strong language may cause little offence and in some situations may be wholly justified in the interests of authenticity.” The question is what those situations are. A presenter on a live programme who swears at a technical cock-up, not realising that his microphone was on, would surely keep his job. Similarly, perhaps, we can excuse drunks, such as the artist Tracey Emin who in 1998 turned up intoxicated for a television discussion of the Turner Prize and said the f-word several times, even while admitting that her mum would be embarrassed.

“Artistic reasons” can sound like a cop-out for lazy writing out to shock, but you can never safely dismiss them either. In both Jerry Springer: The Opera and the political satire, The Thick of It, for example, the obscene language is so baroquely layered it becomes poetic. It does on The Sopranos, too, although here the language has verisimilitude on its side. How would you expect uneducated gangsters to make themselves understood?

No, the real problem with the Ramsayan over-use of those great taboo twins that begin with F and C, is not that they cause too much outrage but too little. We have lost two powerful invectives. When Johnny Rotten said “fuck” on teatime TV in 1976, the programme's presenter was suspended for two weeks; in 2004, Johnny, now trading under the name Johnny Lydon, used the C-word on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! and fewer than 100 viewers out of an audience of 11 million complained. The “worst” words in the language now make programme titles. In 2004 Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about an aristocratic family The Fucking Fulfords. More recently BBC Three transmitted Fuck Off I'm Fat and Fuck Off I'm A Hairy Woman, not to mention last year's The C-Word: How we came to swear by it.

Alas, the C-word. For a while it looked as if 'cunt' would retain its force by offending the fuddy-duddy and the feminist. Yet Ramsay casually includes it. The Archbishop's cause is a lost one. Television is no longer a citadel; it's not even my mother's kitchen. It is Gordon Ramsay's.