Bleeper Blooper

‘IF a clothes shop were to try to flog us off-cuts for the same price as a completed garment, we call it a rip-off.

Denis Norden

If a furniture shop tried to palm us off with a few planks of wood under the guise of a table, we call it Ikea.

But if TV execs try to fill the schedule with programme after programme of outtakes and bloopers, we’re happy to call it entertainment.

Outtake TV is just the latest in a long line of programmes made by piecing together bits of film from the cutting-room floor.

Presented by Anne Robinson, it is described by the BBC as ‘a newly polished version of the bits they didn’t want you to see’.

Which roughly translates as ‘the latest rehash of the old bits they were quite happy for you to see…again and again and again’.

However, what they didn’t want you to see was one thing, what they didn’t want you to hear was quite another.

And the Telegraph reports how, while the Beeb took great trouble to bleep out all the foul language in the programme, the subtitles showed no such reticence.

Instead, hard-of-hearing viewers were treated to a stream of profanities too disgusting to be published on a family website.

The BBC put the whole thing down to ‘a very unfortunate misunderstanding between departments’ – or, for its deaf viewers, ‘a massive fuck up’.’

Posted: 19th, October 2004 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink