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Removing offensive shows will be exception not rule, says Channel 4 boss | Media


Channel 4 has said it will remove offensive programmes from its on-demand archive only in exceptional circumstances, preferring instead to add warnings.

The channel will announce this week details of a review of its principles for addressing or removing historical content now deemed potentially offensive. It follows high-profile cases such as Netflix’s removal of shows including Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen because of the use of blackface. In the US, HBO initially removed Gone With the Wind before returning it with an introductory warning stating that it “denies the horrors of slavery”.

Writing in the Guardian, Channel 4’s editor-at-large, Dorothy Byrne, said it was right for all the UK’s public service organisations to be dealing with their past. The channel has 14,000 hours of programming on its streaming service All 4, dating back to 1982 and the first episode of Brookside.

But she said removing programmes would only happen on rare occasions. “Those thousands of hours of material are not only our own history as a broadcaster, they are part of the social history of our country.”

The comedian Leigh Francis recently apologised for playing characters in blackface on Bo’ Selecta and asked for the episodes to be removed from All 4. Channel 4 agreed, but Byrne said that would be the exception.

“If much-loved characters in the past made homophobic comments or dressed up as people from other ethnic groups or pretended to be people who use wheelchairs, should we destroy that evidence of the social attitudes of the times? Cleaning up our past erases evidence of how views that we would now consider reprehensible were once normalised,” she said.

Byrne cited arguments from the channel’s employee group representing LGBTQ+ staff. “They said they didn’t want the homophobia of the past hidden. It was by fighting the attitudes shown by some characters in older programmes that minorities have achieved the rights and freedoms they have today,” she said.

Programmes with potentially offensive material “are generally best handled by adding warnings rather than removing them entirely,” she added.

Byrne said reviewing 37 years’ worth of material would be close to impossible. But if viewers complained and there were grounds for action, then the channel would examine each case. “We know that it is a matter of judgment, but we will begin from the premise that we should not destroy the past, however embarrassing that past may be, except in exceptional circumstances.”



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