ABSTRACT
The BBC has been justly praised and admired for the high quality of its humorous programmes on both radio and television. The BBC’s rule book of censorship guidelines covering comedy probably attained its fullest and most authoritative form in 1948 in the edition drawn up by Michael Standing the Head of Variety in July of that year. From the very earliest days of broadcasting in Britain concern was expressed about the broadcasting of vulgar humorous material on the radio. The censorship in the BBC of jokes and humour about ethnic and racial groups or about handicaps has followed in some respects a curiously similar trajectory to that of the censorship of vulgarity. The BBC’s censorship of comedy probably served only to limit and restrict the level of pleasure enjoyed by the individuals who listened to or watched its comedy shows.
