Watershed Retains Its Importance With Viewers, Says BSC

The 9:00pm broadcasting watershed is still considered necessary by 75% of viewers according to the Sixth Annual Monitoring Report by the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC).

Viewers believed that the watershed should continue to exist even when there is a warning about the programme’s content. There was a degree of confusion amongst those questioned, however, about whether the watershed operated on cable and satellite encrypted film services: 47% thought it did exist; 31% said it did not and 22% were uncertain.

The BSC report says that although incidents of violence, bad language or sex were low in the daytime, monitors started to note an increase in levels of incidents around 8:00pm.

Violence is of greatest concern for viewers (62%), who also believe that it is the parents’ responsibility to monitor children’s viewing.

Attitudes to sexual activity have relaxed, according to the report. The belief that there is too much sex on television was held by 32% of respondents; a drop of 9% on the previous year.

The treatment of the events surrounding the death of Princess Diana was “not always handled sensitively”, according to the BSC. The monitoring sample which was used during this period was found to be more critical of news and current affairs programmes: in this sample 11% of reports on news and current affairs programmes were deemed to contain incidents of intrusion (compared to 1.9% in the other 1997 samples) and 4.6% as containing incidents of unfairness (1.4% in other 1997 samples).

Broadcasting Standards Commission: 0171 233 0398