Carla Gray: 60 years of charges by the culture police

SOME might have thought it a blessed relief in 1985 when Dire Straits' Money for Nothing completely dominated the airwaves for months on end.

But no-one then was calling for the track to be banned or decrying it as offensive, even though it contained the pejorative word "faggot". In fact, no-one seemed to bat an eyelid.

Fast-forward 26 years and the track has been banned from the Canadian airwaves due to that single word.

It comes after Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was re-published with all instances of the word "nigger" being replaced by the word "slave", because the perceived racism in the book has led to it being banned from school reading lists, preventing a new generation enjoying it.

Although the moves to censorship might seem to reek of the much-derided politically-correct brigade of the 1990s onwards, songs in particular have been the subject of official diktats for decades, and way beyond that.

Professor Geoffrey Pullum, head of linguists and English language at the University of Edinburgh, has watched a sea change over 40 years.

In the 1950s, the BBC still controlled a lot of what was played, often ignoring popular music altogether, while the Lord Chamberlain vetted theatre productions on London's West End, allowing him to order scenes to be taken out or entire plays to be banned outright. "By the 1970s things were looking a bit more sensible, I have a vague impression that over the past ten years things have been tightening up again," says Prof Pullum. "Not from legal restraints but because of misapplied sensitivity . . . that we have to exclude from public discourse even mentions of words that might conceivably offend somebody."

He predicts a backlash in the coming years. "There'll be a period of gradual increasing until people rebel and say this is ridiculous, then a period of breaking the restraints and liberalising again.

"Censorship of what ordinary people want to say and the words they want to use goes along with authoritarian regimes that we would not want to live in."

A look back over recent decades shows just how much sensitivities have changed.

1950s

Wham Bam, Thank You Ma'am by Dean Martin was banned by radio stations for having suggestive lyrics, Cole Porter's classic I Get A Kick Out of You was changed for airplay due to a reference to cocaine and Rosemary Clooney's hit Mambo Italiano was banned for lyrics "void of good taste".

1960s

The Rolling Stones were forced to change the words to Let's Spend the Night Together before appearing on the Ed Sullivan show. Mick Jagger ostentatiously rolled his eyes as he sang the cleaned up lyric "Let's spend some time together". In revenge, the Stones went backstage, and came back out wearing Nazi uniforms with Swastikas, to the fury of their host who immediately banned them from ever appearing again. The musical Hair opened in London in 1968, putting nudity on the stage as never before, the day after censorship ended.

1970s

The Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen was banned by the BBC as the lyrics were judged to be too political and "unpatriotic", while the corporation also blacklisted a Plastic Ono Band track because it contained the lyric "Open your legs".

1980s

Olivia Newton John got into hot water in Utah, USA, where radio stations banned her hit Physical for being too suggestive for the Mormon population. Elsewhere, Scots singer Sheena Easton fell foul of the radio censors because her hit Sugar Walls was judged too sexually suggestive, while Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was famously banned by the BBC after Radio 1 DJ Mike Read stopped playing it mid-track when he saw the bondage-inspired art work on its cover.

1990s

Some high street stores refused to sell the Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, judging it anti-feminist. US judges ruled that all of NWA's (aka Niggers with Attitude) Straight Outta Compton lyrics were obscene under state law and banned them, while the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep was banned from schools by Birmingham City Council on the grounds it was "racially offensive" before condemnation from black parents forced them to back down.

2000s

Just before Christmas, 2007, BBC Radio 1 insisted on replacing the words "faggot" and "slut" in the popular Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. The station later backed down, but MTV channels in the UK still remove and scramble the words "slut", "faggot" and "arse". Schools in Australia replaced the word "gay" with "happy" in the children's song Kukaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.