C4 criticised over football manager's swearing

CHANNEL 4 faced criticism from the Broadcasting Standards Council yesterday for repeating a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Graham Taylor, the former England football manager, in which he used the word 'fuck' 38 times.

Upholding viewers' complaints, the council said it 'regretted that Channel 4 felt it necessary to broadcast this programme again at a time when it had previously been the subject of complaints . . . endorsed by the council'.

When Graham Taylor - The Impossible Job was originally broadcast at 9pm on a weekday evening last January, the council said that, given the content, more attention should have been paid to scheduling.

Channel 4 responded to the latest complaint by arguing that the language had been widely publicised and it would not have been fair to viewers who were interested in the programme to move it to a later slot. Taylor's screen performance was thought to have played a part in his own downfall.

In other rulings, Chris Morris was censured for 'exploitative use of an elderly woman duped into reading out a script containing obscenities' on his BBC Radio 1 comedy show.

Complaints that an interview with a gunman by the writer Lynda La Plante for Channel 4's Men Only series last May had glamorised crime were also upheld. 'The tone of the interview . . . was too jocular,' the council said. 'An impression was created, and insufficiently countered subsequently, that the criminal's activities were condoned.'