It was some relief to learn it hasn’t yet been published in BritainThe novel was called Equation for Evil and what such confused

It was some relief to learn it hasn’t yet been published in Britain”The novel was called Equation for Evil and what such confused thinking reveals is an inability to conceive that the violence in the equation might be differential. “I scripted a massacre,” read the headline in one newspaper yesterday reporting the reaction to Dunblane of an American novelist who has just published a book in which a disturbed loner ambushes a school bus and murders 14 children and the driver before shooting himself in the head “My God, that’s my story But it’s even worse,” he was quoted as saying. It cannot be inappropriate for the governors to build into the editorial process systems to remind staff that their assumptions are not necessarily those of the nation. Most viewers or listeners live in a common-sense world in which – even if sociologists cannot prove a causal link between TV and behaviour – they know that their children’s teachers report an alarming increase in incidents of kicking in the playground when Power Rangers is aired on children’s television.So often the media wants to have it both ways on this. The life with which BBC staff are in touch can be a singularly metropolitan one.

As one listener insisted on a recent Radio 4 phone-in, she did not want to have to switch off because, by the time she realised she had to do that, she had already been offended. What is required by broadcasters is self-discipline rather than self- censorship.The notion that the BBC governors should keep their peculiar prejudices to themselves and leave decisions on taste to BBC producers who are more in touch with real life is a curious one. The V-chip was something she would programme into her TV for her own viewing rather than that of her children. It acquiesces in a downwards drift to a lowest common denominator culture.

What is wrong with irreverent language, asked this newspaper’s leader column yesterday, and why should blasphemy be more offensive than, say, cliche? The commercial pressures on the BBC will dictate a move in the opposite direction, it suggested. And though the power has not been apparently used since 1971 – when it caused such outrage among BBC staff that the sanction has never been invoked since – it sits there still at the top of a raft of internal constraints and checks set out in the corporation’s internal codes of self-discipline.But the main response of the liberals is to insist that, as everyone’s standards are different, it is intolerable that a few people – especially the boring old establishment farts who make up the BBC Board of Governors – should tell the rest of us where the bounds of good taste and decency lie. The Broadcasting Standards Council, which covers all broadcasters including the newer satellite and cable channels, receives and investigates complaints from the public and publishes its findings. And the Broadcasting Complaints Commission is empowered to investigate allegations that individuals have been wronged by television and can impose fines imposed on offending broadcasters.On top of that, the BBC board of governors can vet programmes in advance and ban their broadcast.

British television, they point out, is the most regulated in Europe already – with no fewer than three watchdog bodies in addition to the statutory and common law constraints of obscenity, blasphemy and libel as well as the self-regulation systems on cinema and video.The Independent Television Commission, financed by the TV companies themselves, can impose fines after programmes have been shown and shorten or even revoke ITV franchises. Announcing yesterday that she was quitting after a decade of watching TV for eight hours a day, she confessed she felt bored, frustrated and trapped. For many hours each day they become the context in which our children grow up.”And even as hitherto libertarian a character as Jaci Stephen, who for the past 10 years has reviewed TV programmes for liberal periodicals like the New Statesman as well as popular papers like the Daily Mirror, have launched broadsides. “They are watching programmes in which casual sex, gratuitous violence and extreme language abound. “Our children are spending too much time in front of the television,” said Dr Carey. The V-chip has been seriously considered in recent weeks by the Government as a device for filtering filth from the nation’s TV screens when they are being watched by the young.

Ministers are also considering introducing a new clause in the BBC charter to underscore the role of the corporation’s governors in enforcing standards of good taste and decency.No less a figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday launched a “debate on the morality of Britain” in which he singled out the small box for particular comment. It would be easy to mock again at the horror of one of The Archers gels recently describing one of the other occupants of the Radio 4 rural idyll as “a creepy little shit” or to produce some cod outrage at Chris Evans’s references to oral sex on mid-morning Radio 1.But somehow that is not the mood of the moment. Dunblane has once again resurrected concerns about whether screen violence and pornography prompt copycat responses among the deranged. After all, the battle between artistic freedom and censorship has been joined and won.