Connect/Eddie Holt: John Lydon, who has quit the TV show, I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, used to call himself Johnny Rotten. However, the former Sex Pistol still has a way with words.
In 1976, as Rotten, he uttered on television the four-letter word that rhymes with duck and starts with F. Outrage! The Pistols became instant reprobates and symptoms of a diseased Britain.
Designer shock is a cheap career move but it worked for Johnny. This week, 28 years after effing on ITV's Today show, Lydon quit another ITV gig. However, before he left he used the adjectival form of his 1976 swear-word to qualify the plural of an even ruder one. Indeed, the word that rhymes with hunt and starts with C is considered the most offensive of all expletives.
Nonetheless, not many people appear to have been offended. Fewer than 100 people rang ITV and Ofcom (Britain's broadcasting regulator) to complain. Given that the show attracts between 10 and 11 million viewers, that number of complainants is miniscule - fewer than one in every 100,000. Even super-coarse swearing on television has, it seems, lost the power to shock.
Of course, the context within which foul language is uttered on TV matters greatly. Bill Grundy's Today was a teatime show; I'm A Celebrity goes out after the 9 p.m. watershed. In fact, it was almost 10.30 p.m. when the now middle-aged, property-dealing Lydon - purporting to be incensed at viewers for not voting him off the dreadful show - described them with characteristic bluntness. Were Lydon to use his distinctive language at 6 p.m., there would certainly be more people complaining. But he'd probably have to swear on children's TV or in a current affairs programme to generate the outrage of a generation ago.
That's ironic, given that the Pistols clearly wanted, as juveniles do, to attract attention, while this week Johnny may have been reacting resignedly.
Sure, he'd have known what he was doing and have realised it could cause some stir. It also echoes the notorious TV swearing episode of his youth and, in that, there's arguably wistfulness. (Johnny Rotten as a sentimentalist is an awkward line of argument and it would surely irritate him to new levels of verbal coarseness. But even former punks can be nostalgic and soppy.) Anyway, an excess of bad language on television would quickly be tedious and debasing. Then again, "bad language" is a subjective matter and there are worse words than unattractive swear-words. The downright lies of some advertising or the weasel words of powerful people are infinitely more damaging than John Lydon reverting to being Johnny Rotten.
Mere vulgarity is insignificant beside many of the monstrosities broadcast daily. Coarseness is not attractive but, being obvious, it's less likely to be insidious than unexpressed agendas. There's usually more poison in the officialese of press releases spun, not for public benefit, but for that of governments, business and other vested interests, than in the guff of a loudmouth ex-punk.
Lydon's vocabulary and attitude constitute an assault on manners. People are expected not to say that sort of stuff on television and it's not insufferably tight-arsed to believe that. Fair enough. But an assault on manners is a much less grievous offence than an assault on morality - a mere graze as opposed to a deep stabbing. Perhaps people realise as much nowadays.
Then again, maybe that's excessively optimistic. It may simply be that the entertainment "industry" (always sounds like a contradiction in terms!) has polluted society with so much sleaze in order to make a buck that swear-words - even a gross one - cannot shock any more. There are debasements of people and culture beyond that generated by rude words.
The show on which Lydon uttered his expletives is arguably more offensive and debasing than his verbal crudities could ever be. That's another context and, considered that way, it's little wonder that his remark generated such miniscule complaint. Even Johnny Rotten can't stand out against a rotten background and presumably viewers understand as much.
In one sense, it's obscene to devote much attention to a few swear-words spoken on television. In another, however, their very use illuminates the nonsense of taking them too seriously. With TV plumbing ever deeper depths of nastiness and appeals to prurience by catering to jaded appetites it has helped degrade, swear-words can, ironically, be cultural heroes.
It's not the vulgarians swearing like troopers you need to watch. It's the smoothies "on message" in terms of content and tone who may be really insulting you, patronising you and playing you for a fool.
Put it this way: are a few swear-words from Johnny Rotten as insidious as the many polished, albeit stilted, "defences" proffered for Brian Hutton's report in the last week? After last week's dissembling by the Huttonites, this week has been more plain-speaking, however coarse. Apart from Lydon's outburst in the jungle there was a sign at Old Trafford last weekend: "Fuck Off, Dodgy Horse Dealers," it said.
Inelegant certainly, but at least its message was a model of clarity.