Top Cat

The BBC’s shameful treatment of Top Cat

Films nowadays often come with warning of ‘smoking’, ‘partial nudity’, ‘drug use’ or something called ‘language’ (presumably to prevent alarming people un-aware of the invention of the talkies). Yet language can be triggering. I know that from watching the BBC as a child, when two linguistic absurdities drove the seven-year-old me practically insane. One was the Blue Peter habit of referring to Sellotape as ‘sticky-backed plastic’, a phrase unspoken by anyone else in any other circumstances, except in parodies of BBC children’s programmes. ‘Inappropriate behaviour’ can be used, like a blank tile in Scrabble, to imply scandal without any supporting facts Worse still was the practice of BBC continuity announcers