How are live TV programs censored? They always seem to manage to get the swear words blanked out. I don’t understand how they do this…are things maybe not really “live,” but delayed by a few seconds? Are there people paid just to hit the “beep” button? 
How about nudity? That must be harder to censor. Or are there really no live TV shows at all? Hmm…I want to be a nudity censor 
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean your mother.
I understand that there is a 7-second loop during which bleeps can be inserted, on radio and television alike.
In the early days of television, there were instances of nudity. One or two instances from the Soupy Sales Show (or whatever it was called) show up on Dick Clark’s blooper programs (censored, of course).
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. (Oscar Wilde)
What I meant to say is that the scenes are censored for the Dick Clark shows. They originally aired uncensored because the 7-second loop hadn’t been implemented yet. I’m not sure but I think the nudity was caused by a woman’s costume falling off.
It’s not a “loop.” It’s a “delay.” And not every live show has it. I watch WWF Raw is War Monday nights and it’s always amusing when the guy on the bleep button misses the cuss word entirely and does a long bleep over the next several words or even sentences. They only recently started bleeping anything, and I gotta think the guy working the button’s been told not to be all that vigilant about it.
As I recall the Soupy Sales incident, Soupy was to poen a door to greet a character and in place of the character was a stripper as a practical joke. There was no nudity shown on the program as the stripper was shot from the back, waist up. www.snopes.com has some more information on Soupy Sales ULs.
There was also the oft-excerpted clip from The Price is Right where a woman in a tube top became a woman out of a tube top, but TPIR is taped weeks in advance so the nudity was masked with black bars.
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
Its not always 7 seconds, it can be 5 seconds or 6 seconds. It’s just a delay they can set up for ONE person or everyone.
The running joke on a popular local Radio show here in New York (Opie and Anthony - yes, Boston, those guys) is that they have a 40-second delay because of the nature of their show (carefully un-planned [sic] anarchy, with generous helpings both sexual content and controvesial topics), with at least 2 censors in the loop (I forgot if Black Earl was suppose to do any censoring also - haven’t checked their web site in quite awhile).
For all that supervision, oftentimes hilarious show when they get into a grove (e.g. the recent Doctor Smith interview).
Syndication Now.
The use of a delay is pretty common, though not necessarily effective - for instance, recently on the academy awards, one or two words were bleeped, but they completely missed one young woman in the audience exposing her nipple for about 2-3 seconds on international TV…
On the local news a year or so back, the announcers in the studio cut to a live broadcast of one of their roving reporters at a concert site. Behind the announcer was a topless woman on a man’s shoulders. When they broke back to the newsroom, the female announcer was in tears laughing so hard, but the male announcer deadpanned, “Well, I guess our viewers got a little more than they bargained for.” Later it was explained that a delay was employed, but that the editor was only privy to the audio signal, and was not aware of the nudity.
I’m not sure if it was the Soupy Sales Show or maybe the Jack Parr Show, but I remember once an actress was demonstrating a yoga headstand and had apparently forgotten (1) gravity can cause your dress to fall down and (2) that she was not wearing any underwear. There was no delay and this was broadcast for all the world to see.