Film and television

Fuck in film and television

For half a century the word was the single most important variable in a film's rating and the fastest way to get a broadcaster into trouble. It still is, which is why the rules around it are so precise.

The first times

The Hollywood Production Code banned the word outright from 1934, along with almost everything else. It is usually said to have first reached mainstream cinema in 1967, in the British film Ulysses (which the BBFC passed with cuts) and I'll Never Forget What's'isname, in which Marianne Faithfull says it. In America the first mainstream uses came in 1970, in M*A*S*H ("all right, Bud, your fucking head is coming right off") and Myra Breckinridge. By the mid-1970s it was routine in adult drama, and Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) set the pattern of the word as the natural rhythm of a certain kind of male talk.

On British television the first use was live and unplanned: the critic Kenneth Tynan, on the late-night discussion programme BBC-3 on 13 November 1965, asked whether he would allow a play showing sexual intercourse, replied that he doubted "there are any rational people to whom the word fuck would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden". Four motions were tabled in the Commons, Mary Whitehouse wrote to the Queen, and the BBC apologised. Eleven years later, on 1 December 1976, the Sex Pistols appeared on Thames Television's teatime Today programme with a visibly drunk Bill Grundy, who invited them to "say something outrageous". Steve Jones obliged ("you dirty fucker... what a fucking rotter"). The Daily Mirror headline was "The Filth and the Fury", Grundy was suspended, and the band became famous overnight.

The rules: Britain

The British Board of Film Classification rates by "strong language", which in practice means this word. Its published guidelines allow infrequent strong language at 12A depending on manner and context, frequent strong language at 15, and reserve "the strongest terms" (which means cunt) for 15 in exceptional context or 18. The King's Speech (2010) was given a 12A in the UK, uncut, after the distributor appealed a 15 over the scene in which George VI is made to swear as therapy; in the US the same scene earned an R. Television is governed by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code and the 9pm watershed: the word is not permitted before it except in the most exceptional circumstances, and Ofcom's audience research in 2016 and 2021 placed it in the "strongest" category alongside cunt and motherfucker. Live broadcasts get a limited allowance for accidents provided the broadcaster apologises quickly, which is why presenters on breakfast television apologise so fluently.

The rules: America

The Motion Picture Association's system is famous for one rule. A film can use the word once, as an expletive, and keep a PG-13. A second use, or any sexual use, normally means an R, unless two-thirds of the ratings board votes to allow it. Directors therefore ration it: The Martian, Titanic, Adventures in Babysitting and dozens of others spend their single permitted fuck at a chosen moment. The 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated is largely about the absurdity of the arrangement. On broadcast television the Federal Communications Commission polices "indecency" between 6am and 10pm; the "fleeting expletive" cases over Bono, Cher and Nicole Richie at awards shows went to the Supreme Court twice. Cable and streaming are outside the FCC's reach, which is why HBO could make Deadwood.

The heavy users

Counts differ depending on whether compounds and infixes are included, so treat these as approximate.

Television landmarks

• The Wire, "Old Cases" (2002): Bunk and McNulty re-examine a murder scene for four minutes using no word but fuck and its variants, some three dozen times. The most celebrated demonstration of the word's range ever filmed.
• Deadwood (2004–06): David Milch's western, deliberately anachronistic, with something like 1.5 fucks per minute across the series and "cocksucker" as the second favourite. Milch argued that period-accurate blasphemy would have sounded like Yosemite Sam.
• The Thick of It (2005–12): Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker made the word into an art form; the show employed Ian Martin as a credited "swearing consultant". See Comedy.
• The F Word (2005–10): Gordon Ramsay's Channel 4 cookery show, named for the word and the food. Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares did more than any programme to make the word a mark of professional intensity.
• Succession, Veep, Peep Show, Derry Girls, Fleabag: modern comedy and drama in which the word is so routine that nobody now counts.
• Father Ted (1995–98): proved that a substitute (feck) can carry a whole show at teatime.

Censoring it

The bleep (a 1 kHz tone) dates from radio in the 1950s and became a comic device in its own right. Television edits for daytime replace the word with "freaking", "flipping", "forget" or, in the famous TV cut of The Big Lebowski, "this is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps". Airline and network edits of Snakes on a Plane and Die Hard 2 ("Yippee-ki-yay, Mr Falcon") are collected online as a genre of their own.