French music stations and tourist bars are awash just now with profanity - in English. No one bats an eyelid; they just join in ...
The most important blot on Sir Peregrine Worsthorne's career is not that he was the second person, beaten to it only by Kenneth Tynan, known to utter the four-letter word beginning with F on British television.
He had previously been an enthusiastic supporter of the pre-Taliban US campaign of persecution of left-wing sympathisers in the murky era of Senator Joe McCarthy, and that was far, far worse. Answer yes to "Do you have, or have you ever had, a mind of your own?" and you risked never working again.
But Perry did his bit for the process by which a word you never heard in polite company, and certainly not on the BBC, gradually came to be just another part of the vocabulary.
Part of me says: "So what?" It is, after all, just an arrangement of four letters. By all means challenge the expressive powers of those who find it impossible to speak without liberal recourse to it, and other expletives, but why on earth should we get upset at its use, even in public settings?
The other part remembers how rare it was, even if you did not lead a particularly sheltered life, to hear the word uttered so cheaply in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. And how men would rebuke anyone who use profanity in front of women - by which I do not mean before the women had a chance to use it themselves - and also how uncommon it was to hear a girl or woman swear.
The experience or recent years, indeed decades, should take me back to the "so what?" position.
Well-educated and highly feminine women of my professional and social acquaintance have taken to using expletives almost as readily as men.
What used to be called foul language is heard routinely in the cinema and on television. Some respectable newspapers make no attempt to expurgate it; those that do, with initials followed by the precise number of dashes or asterisks, merely ensure that readers think the missing letters.
So none of us is any longer surprised to hear the F word or any other offending term spoken or written almost as a first resort. And in many walks of life, this is no longer a matter for any kind of concern or disapproval.
Up to a point.
I could not help myself feeling a little taken aback the first time I heard the dance record Loca People, a summer hit in which the phrase "What the ****?" is repeated over and over again in accented English by one Esthera Sarita. .
This item - I hesitate to call it a song - is now almost impossible to escape on the radio or in seafront bars on the Med. In the bars, dancers spout the words themelves in unison with the record, just as they do the other key words: "So I called my friend Johnny/And I said to him/Johnny, La gente esta muy loca."
But again, does it matter (which was precisely the context Sir P had in mind in 1973 when he used the F word on the early-evening BBC news magazine of the age,Nationwide)?
As my former colleague, Christopher Howse, put it in a Telegraph blog posting: "His little plan, if he should be asked what the public thought about politicians going to bed with call girls, would be to reply that he thought that people didn’t give a ..."
He was asked and duly gave his rehearsed response.
It is said this premeditated indiscretion cost Perry the prize, which had been widely predicted for him, of the editorship of The Sunday Telegraph, so dismayed was the owner, Lord Hartwell, by his conduct. But at least one other reason has been advanced for that, as Howse pointed out: "Others thought that incidents such as his exchange of shirts with Nigel Lawson’s first wife Vanessa in a Brighton restaurant during the Tory party conference might have had something to do with it too."
Sir P was also banned by his boss from accepting invitations to appear on TV for six months.
Somehow I do not suppose that Esthera Sarita, who has been described as Bosnian and also as Dutch, will find her access to the screen denied, or her career path generally blocked, by her own lapse from good taste, even if the editorship of De Telegraaf or its Bosnian equivalent figures among her ambitions.
Recent Comments