I’ve been watching a lot of British TV lately and I’ve noticed a few things that would never be shown on American TV, and some things that would never be shown without making a big deal out of them.
If you see a “normal” American couple, in almost every case, it’s going to be a man and a woman of the same race. Brits seem not to care if the couple is one black and one white, or two women, or two men. If you saw a couple like these on American TV, it would be a plot point. There, it’s nothing to take note of.
Also, they swear a lot more freely.
And the sexuality is a lot less veiled. Example- two characters were trapped in close proximity and kissed. Afterward, one says he wasn’t all that turned on. The other says she felt his hard-on. Americans might say I felt how excited you were, but not be so specific.
I’ve never been there, and I don’t know any British people personally, so I’m going totally off what I see on the telly. Have the Brits by and large gotten over the prejudices us Yanks still deal with? If not, does the BBC get grief about this kind of thing?
Is this pre-watershed or post-watershed TV? I don’t think it’s as “enlightened” pre-watershed (except maybe with the race thing).
What’s a watershed? I’m mostly watching stuff from 2007 onwards.
9 PM is the watershed. Shows which air after 9 PM are called “post watershed”
On the issue of race, definitely. On American TV, I get the feeling that if a character is black, they are black for a reason or to make a statement. On British TV, the fact that they happen to be black is usually incidental. That attitude extends much more to everyday life here, as well. I’m not pretending that racism doesn’t exist in the UK - far from it - but because we don’t have the same history as the US, it isn’t a huge deal in the same way that it is in America.
Yeah that. British shows post-watershed can have more swearing and boobs than pre-watershed.
IIRC a similar concept exists in the US, but major networks are more loathe to take advantage because post-watershed in some time zones is still pre-watershed in others until you get so late in the evening that potential viewers are going to bed anyway (and making sure the same shows show at different times in different time zones is overly complicated for some reason). Britain has only one time-zone so things like that don’t matter.
I also figure that HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax lobby the FCC to keep decency standards in place so they can be the nation’s source for soft-core porn.
On the other hand, Britain does not allow satirical programs to use footage of Parliment to hold it up to ridicule:
Not so enlightened when it comes to political speech.
Also, drinking. If you see teenagers drinking on American TV, you just know one of them is going to die horribly, become pregnant or in some other way come unstuck. (Plus, they’ll always be drinking out of one of those brightly coloured plastic cups - what’s that all about?).
On UK TV, they’ll just get wasted and have a laugh 
I won’t disagree with you, but I know of one big exception: the second series of Prime Suspect was all about racial tension and politics. Of course it’s also about 20 years old now.
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Moved from GQ to IMHO.
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Some of the examples in the OP make sense to me. Some don’t.
Is swearing a lot “enlightened”? I thought it was just uncultured.
At parties where the potables are served out of a keg, those disposable plastic cups really are the norm. There are also, of course, social events where folks drink out of individual bottles or cans, but TV probably prefers the keggers because then there’s no issue with product placement (even if there is a label on the keg, it’s probably sitting in a tub of ice, so you can’t see it).
As for race, would the same apply for a mixed white and south Asian couple? To the extent there’s an analogy in Britain to the American racial situation, that would seem to be it.
IME Brits are no more enlightened than most Americans and often very culturally ignorant and/or bigoted. Of course lots of exceptions to any generalization. Their entertainment may be more liberal than American entertainment…
I wondered if I was the only person alive who was still unaware that being able to utter the phrase “hard on” on television was apparently the height of Enlightenment…
Yeah, you’re definitely watching too much British TV. No self-respecting American calls it “the telly”.
I believe in the British airing of the Simpsons they bleep out any sort of profanity and anything otherwise offensive. Not to mention Britain has Sharia courts, you can get arrested for “hate speech”, and so on.
Actual sharia-law courts, or just optional religious-based arbitration? We had a similar situation in Ontario a few years ago, a proposal for non-binding Islamic family arbitration hit the news, and after a lot of yelling, all religious-based arbitration ended up being banned. Boy, were the other religions mad…
Okay, using harsher or more explicit language isn’t a sign of enlightenment. Reflecting how people actually speak, rude words and all, seems progressive.
No, the Brits don’t seem to be as hung up on skin color as Americans are (probably because they didn’t have a war over slavery), but they do get hung up on dumb things like hair color.
People are assholes all over the world. The only difference is what issue they become assholes about.
[troll] Well, you gotta admit, gingers are creepy [/troll]
I think we discriminate, but we do it differently.
For example, There was a black-skinned girl of African descent in my middle-school class. I mentally clasified her as Scottish because she had a strong scottish accent.