How is this to be done with no swearing smoking sex or drugs? Well it can’t be which is why I find myself having

How is this to be done with no swearing, smoking, sex or drugs? Well, it can’t be, which is why I find myself having to answer the question “Mummy, what does the F stand for in T.F.I. Fridays?”Youth culture has actually been going quite a long time, and it must post a continual threat if it to be credible. It is a sign of how conservative rather than how liberal we are that swearing is considered so shocking. Evans has been constantly reprimanded for swearing on air, many stand- up comics rely on getting a laugh just by saying the word “Shag”. None of this brings about the collapse of the Western World because much of it relentlessly laddish It’s about having a laugh rather than making a point It is anti-authority but apolitical. It is about not sucking up to bosses, chiefs, the establishment. It is about being rude not radical.The BBC cannot buy in this spirited chippiness and then balk when it crosses over the very lines that its target audience does not care about anyway.

By sacking Baker and Evans, it turns them into heroic defenders of freedom The freedom to be what? A mouthy bloke. An ugly bloke with a talent, as Chris Evans might say?Yet for all the fuss, the only mavericks I’ve seen on screen recently have been Chris Morris who is some kind of god, Mrs Merton trying to locate “Charlie” for those backstage at the Brit awards and Homer Simpson. The surprise is not how out of control broadcasting is but how so many of the conventions stay intact Without them of course Morris could not shine. He could not satirise the pomposity of current affairs, the arrogance of the Buerks and Paxmans, he could not discuss morality in terms of “good Aids” and “bad Aids”, he could not inform us that Noel Edmonds is a murderer, he could not show businessmen injecting “illegal high drugs” into their groin while discussing a new line of jam. He depends entirely on the media loop.He constructs programmes about other programmes. He needs to continually overstep the line to show us how meaningless the lines are. If the BBC can’t tolerate them, such broadcasters will easily find other homes.

If audiences don’t like it, they can switch to something more to their taste. That’s what a deregulated market means and in such a world loose cannons are not just guns for hire, but the biggest guns of all.. President Mary Robinson’s meeting in Rome with Pope John Paul II tomorrow is a historic occasion. The last time a female head of Ireland, Elizabeth I, came in direct contact with the Pope, she was excommunicated The parallels are striking, but so too are the contrasts. Elizabeth I was sovereign head of a country at the forefront of a major challenge to the power of Rome: England.