Why are swear words bleeped or muted when we have parental control on the DSTV platform?
At BBC Worldwide we must abide by our own editorial values and standards, one of the most important of these is that “we will not broadcast that might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of children”. In the past this has meant that we removed extreme violence, scenes that could, if copied by a child, cause them harm, explicit sex and strong language from programmes that went out during the day. At the time we had to do this because we could not be sure that the parental control system operating on DSTV was going to work in tandem with our own system of logging challenging content. We just couldn’t take the risk. However we have since been reassured by the Chief Technical Officer at MultiChoice that the set top box parental control system will work with our ratings guidance so we have now started on the enormous task of creating only Prime time, post watershed, versions of all our programmes. These will increasingly be used for daytime as well as evening and, so
