1974 The TV show Amy Prentiss in either the series opener Jessica Walter the detective goes to the morgue. The doctor lifts the sheet covering a female body and we get in profile a shot of a completely nude woman. The shot included nippleage. I was impressed.
And, I don’t recall ever hearing specifics about this particular case, but those 50 letters are usually from one church congregation in Kansas, or some 80 year old woman writing 50 different letters because she has nothing better to do.
When it comes to censorship in the US, it can sometimes take a vocal minority of only 1 or 2 people to ruin it for the other ~300 million of us. Frustrating, really.
[Kent Brockman] I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Democracy simply doesn’t work. [/KB]
I cannot find it now but but earlier this year I posted about a live vasectomy shown on British daytime TV. At about 11 o’clock in the morning. The same show (“This Morning”) has also featured a graphic demonstration of how blokes should check their testicles. Nobody bats an eyelid.
When it comes to nudity on TV, Australia leads the way! Legendary Aussie soap opera Number 96 featured frontal nudity in the early 70’s. I also remember another mid-70’s show Silent Number feautring a very graphic frontal nude opening shot of a male and female murder victims, which was quite the eye opener at the time! A third Aussie soap of the early-mid 70’s The Box - WARNING!! probably not safe for work also featured lashings of gratuitous nudity, usually featuring the delectable Belinda Giblin - as well as our first on screen lesbian kiss! And all of this pre-1976. So if you wnated nude inthe 70’s, Aussie TV was the place to be!
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I’ve seen a couple of documentaries over the years which show a woman giving birth.
If that’s the same scene I’m thinking of, it’s from a Desmond Morris documentary—It might have actually been called “The Human Animal.”
And believe me, that’s not the ONLY nude shot in Mr. Morris’ works. You should have seen the episode on human reproduction. Whoa.
Oh, and…does Comedy Central count as “basic cable”? If so…I happened to unexpectedly catch an uncensored episode of “Drawn Together,” the other night. No bleeps or blurring—which came to a horrific head when Toots tried to one-up Foxxy’s wardrobe malfunction. (I guess some things ARE better left to the imagination. :eek: )
Also, if I recall, the actual original shot of said boobage was a fairly long-distance shot. I had to ask a friend who was their with me if I just saw what I thought I just saw.
Only in the endless re-runs of the incident was the boob show in all it’s full close-up glory.
VCNJ~
I’ve never seen the actual, uncensored footage, but there was an old Price is Right episode where a woman’s top fell off while she was running down to play the game.
Kind of a shameful story there. Yes, in the 1970’s and 80’s PBS presented quite a bit of lovely nudity, particularly in “Masterpiece Theatre” productions such as “I, Claudius” and “Lost Empires”. All this for many years, with little or no protest.
Then, in 1993, PBS presented the miniseries “Tales of the City”, based on stories by Armistead Maupin. It was perhaps the highest-rated show they ever had, and since there was plenty more material, they prepared to do “More Tales of the City”. But – some bluenose Southern Congressmen raised a tremendous fuss, claiming to be shocked at the brief appearance of breasts on the show. Which was nonsense; as noted, PBS had shown nudity for many years. It was obvious that what they really didn’t like was a show with sympathetic gay characters who actually had sex.
Here’s the shameful part – PBS caved, and dropped plans for “More Tales”. Fortunately, the premium cable channel TMC (The Movie Channel) picked it up. I saw Laura Linney (starring in “Tales of the City”) on Tom Snyder’s show talking about the whole affair, and she mocked the slogan PBS was using at the time: “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” by answering, “Apparently, TMC!”
Don’t know if this happened nationally, but on my local PBS station the breasts of the at-the-time straight woman were pixillated. However, the bare asses of the gay men at the gay nude beach were not. Which was, while appreciated by a certain segment of the series’ fanbase, odd.
Nitpick: the sequels aired on Showtime originally, not TMC.
Do you guys get the CBC with regular cable in the US? We do here in Seattle, since I watch the Simpsons on it every day at 5 o’clock. I don’t watch it very often, but growing up, they have no problem showing nudity on that channel (or most Canadian channels), whenever. My ex used to ask me if the CBC showed porn all the time, which was confusing to me, until I realised he’d heard that we don’t censor nudity in Canada. Full frontal male, female, whatever. No big deal was ever made out of it. It’s not porn, and actual sex scenes* may * be shown after hours, if it’s in the program, but we don’t fall all over ourselves to get sex in the programs.
To be quite honest, I find it far more startling to be channel surfing here in the US, and to realise those digitally scrambled blocks are covering an innocent pair of breasts. Even cartoon ones! I mean, sheesh.
Here in Canada, our basic cable is just filled with ‘documentaries’ on sex. They’re on just about every night, and they can be incredibly graphic. I was flipping through the channels one night and I hit a channel with a big closeup of a penis, slowly becoming more and more erect. The show was some documentary on sex. The same show actually had a camera inserted inside a woman’s vagina as a man ejaculated into her. There are also ‘documentaries’ on swinging, kinky sex, you name it. All very graphic, sometimes even hardcore.
I saw that one with the camera in the woman’s vagina! Several years ago, now… I still wonder who had to pull that thing out of there and clean it off. Bleh. :eek:
I remember watching an uncensored Benny Hill episode in the early eighties, late at night on the local abc channel (cbs, nbc?? not sure which one.). It was one of the racier episodes of Benny Hill that had actual nudity. I was totally floored, couldn’t believe it… BOOBIES on TV!
They had that one on the Discovery channel, too! (Actually, they had it in a couple of different documentaries—one was uncensored, one was pixilated…kinda. They used a lot of tiny pixels, so it wasn’t really hiding anything.)
I was watching Little Britain on DVD and was mildly surprised to find a few instances of full frontal male nudity in it. Especially in one series of sketches where one lady is recommending men to another one based entirely on polaroids of their penises.
I don’t know how heavily censored the thing was as a whole, since I didn’t watch the whole thing, but “Splash” was on last night on ABC Family (founded by Pat Robertson), a basic cable channel.
I figured it wasn’t worth watching because of the fact it would surely be censored into mush, but I when I started watching partway through, I saw nipples several times, and unexperged references to sex, including the word “fucking.”
I guess since it is 20 or so years old, it’s ok. :dubious:
I think we need to convince the network to broadcast a nightly series of teen-sex-comedies of the 80s, so as to further the secularist gay agenda recruitment drive. 
In the mid or late 1970s PBS aired a British (I believe it was ITV) production of Candide by Voltare there is a great deal of nudity in it. In fact the initial showing was stopped in Great Britain because of the controversy surrounding it. Then the BBC showed all the “nasty bits” on air to explain what all the discussion was about. And since those scene had then been shown, it was permitted to be shown on the commercial station. But I remember no big problem coming out of the PBS showing.
My first big memory of nudity on television, however, was in the late 50s (yes, the 1950s). I was ten or 11 and I was home alone (it could have been New Years Eve or they could have been at a Christmas party or something). It was about 11 p.m. and a local independent channel (this was back in the days when in this good-sized city there were three networks, an “educational” channel and an independent) started broadcasting the 1936 German film about the Olympics. It begins with three very attractive, blond, naked women dancing around and playing catch with a large clear beach ball. This goes on for about five-plus minutes.
To say this pubesent lad was glued to the television is an understatement, Jason, Michael Myers, the Frankenstein monster and wolfman could have come running into the house and I would have just waved them off. My only great fear was that my mother would return from the get-together she and my father were at before the nudity and womanliness were off the air because I knew I was incapable of turning it off. And she would see me looking at naked ladies.
Nazi nudes! <shudder> So much for supposedly having the best uniforms.