Sometimes videos are considered so outrageous, they end up either banned or relegated to way-past-your-bedtime screenings. Usually this is because they are deemed to be too sexually explicit. Madonna's infamously erotic Justify My Love, for example, met with the usual media "shock, horror" hype when it was first released six years ago. It was only given very limited screenings, and needless to state, won particularly high audience figures. Could you be blamed for wondering if there was some sort of deliberate ploy here?

These days videos like the Prodigy's latest effort, with its sex, drugs and violence, are still getting the late-night treatment. Two videos, including one by the Cardigans, have recently been banned entirely by MTV. Interestingly, the Prodigy and the Cardigans share a director, Jonas Akerlund, who denies his brief was to make videos which would be banned, resulting in so much hype that both songs would fly up the charts. In the Cardigans' video for My Favourite Game, lead singer Nina Persson drives through the American desert in an open-top convertible without her hands on the wheel, hits a lorry head on - and the impact sends her shooting straight up to heaven.

Having seen this video, would you drive your open-top convertible through the American desert with no hands on the wheel for a similar experience? Or could it be that MTV simply felt such a graphic depiction of death isn't the sort of thing people tune into a music station for? MTV has a fairly strict ethical code, which many musicians feel amounts to repressive censorship that limits their freedom of expression. One way or another, Jonas Akerlund finds the MTV decision to ban his video for the Cardigans bewildering: "I think it's terrible if I make a video which is censored or not shown. I can't really understand MTV's decision to censor parts of the video in England and America. I think it's really stupid."