In daily life I speak English ninety-five percent of the time, and if it wouldn’t be for French television, I would have probably forgotten my mother tongue a long time ago.
It is for that reason (and a few more) that I subscribe to TV5MONDE, a French television channel.
It is the paucity of intelligent programs that prompted me in the first place to find an alternative to American networks offerings.
The second reason for my alienation from American television is the brutish, unrelenting force-feeding of commercial messages. Gag me with a spoon!
On TV5MONDE, praise the Lord, they have the good sense to totally exclude that advertising rubbish.
But there are some drawbacks.
On overly puritanical American television, someone will occasionally drops the F-bomb, but on some French programs we are often subjected to non-stop carpet-bombing.
Some so-called entertainers seem to equate humor with vulgarity.
Short of vocabulary, culture or wit, they manage to extract embarrassed giggles from captive audiences by lacing their monologues with smut.
They compensate their obvious lack of talent with crude references to sex or bodily functions.
Queen Victoria and I are definitely not amused!
I have never been prudish and I am not easily offended, but I strenuously object to vulgarity, especially in a public context.
You don’t need to be vulgar to be amusing and Vulgarians are seldom amusing.
They are like homeless people masking offensive bodily odors with lewd oral pyrotechnics.
Nudity is not offensive, gutter utterances are.
Young children are often listening to those programs and as everybody knows “monkey sees, monkey does”.
The little brats will soon be walking around spewing four-letter words, obscenities and expletives.
Is it what you expect from television?
You don’t have to go to church to be a well-mannered human being. Just keep rinsing your mouth (and especially your children’s) with soap and replacing your obscenity filters as often as you replace your furnace filters.
Free speech yes, vulgarity NO!
Alain
