Harry's Blog

While I was over in Los Angeles for E3 2006 I did have a chance to watch some TV in the hotel room. When we first switched the TV on we were greeted with the visage of Adam Hart-Davis in one of his splendid history programmes. Odd to see such a show in the US, but it was on the History Channel.

One of the things that visitors to the USA often comment on is the frequency and duration of the commercial break. I didn’t find these to be as bad as I was expecting but I was rather shocked by the content of many of the commercials. Advertising diet pills seemed very common, in particular anti-depressant diet pills. Clearly this stuff doesn’t work, if it did, it would be more widely available and there would be no fat people around. But these adverts were strong stuff and clearly aimed to fleece the vulnerable. There’s no way they would be allowed on British TV.

However the worst thing I saw on television in Los Angeles was the movie The Long Kiss Goodnight. The movie, starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson is a personal favourite, offering some great action and hilarious snappy dialogue. So when the movie started I was delighted that there was something so good to watch while finishing up some work.

It wasn’t long though before it became clear that this was the worst TV-edit hatchet job I’d ever seen. Those of you who remember the “bunnyfunster” style editing of movies on British TV would think yourselves lucky if you’d seen this. Whole sections of The Long Kiss Goodnight were removed. So many in fact that the movie didn’t seem anything like the original. It was neither funny nor had much action in it. For example, here’s a list of early scenes that didn’t appear:

• The whole AF monologue hotel room scene
• The Christmas party
• The guy in jail
• Most of the pre-car crash conversation
• Most of Timothy’s first scene
• All of the attack on the house
• Most of the in-car “Feeeeemale” conversation

In fact there wasn’t much of the movie there at all. It only took a few minutes to get to the point where Samantha and Mitch were driving in a car together. It was at this point I gave up as I couldn’t believe they’d butchered a movie that much. Sure I can understand, though don’t agree with, light edits for TV. But to remove whole sections of the movie is ridiculous. The movie was being shown at 9pm too and at the rate it was going, would have finished around 10pm. Seeing as there seemed to be an unwillingness to show either violence or crude humour there was very little else left. I bet anyone watching who’d never seen the movie wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on.

I’ve just had a look at the Wikipedia entry for the channel TBS and it seems it is well known for censoring movies in this manner. Why bother showing them at all. Thankfully there was some good stuff on the channel including plenty of Futurama, which is why we had it on in the first place.