ABSTRACT
An analysis of the kinds of image not allowed to appear in television programmes can tell us a lot about the television medium. Cutting images involves assumptions about how audiences watch television, and how television images can be meaningful to us. The decision to cut an image must be based on the ability to identify and determine what that image represents. So the act of seeing and making sense of the television image is the first precondition for censorship. Furthermore, the significance of what the image might mean for a viewer (for the person cutting it himself or herself, and for another hypothetical television viewer) draws on assumptions about the image’s effects. Cutting out an image is motivated by a concern about how the image might provoke a response in the viewer who sees it. Television censorship, then, is a topic where questions of ideology, the semiotics of the television image, and pleasure and repulsion (what we enjoy seeing and what we would prefer not to see) are fundamental. Paradoxically, looking at what we cannot see can tell us much about what seeing and understanding mean.
