Essential Works

A f**king good morning to you

The BBC has recently been forced to move their ‘watershed’ barriers back an hour, making it impossible for anyone to talk bollocks (and especially fucking bollocks) on Aunty’s airwaves until after 10pm. How does one circumvent this unnatural state of affairs? By writing a book titled Filthy English and getting John Humphrys to engage with it - bleeps and all - before 8 am on Radio 4’s Today programme.

Which is precisely what Essential author Pete Silverton has pulled off, going by the sound of his satisfying and apposite one-word example of how ineffably effective the word can sometimes be: “clusterfuck” - the grounds on which a Liverpudlian friend turned down a top job at the Olympics, believing it would be just that. Hard to beat for verbal gumption.

The subtext to all those bleeps is this: language is organic and so are swear words. As Silverton points out, our parents’ generation used “bloody” and bugger” but never the F-word. While our grandparents who resorted to “damned” were outraged by “bloody” - fixed forever in our minds by that Shavian moment when Eliza Doolittle erupts with “Not bloody likely!” - a term that had never before been uttered at His Majesty’s Theatre. “Damned” once had strong religious connotations that simply no longer held.

Completely free of Whitehall-washing “meeting of targets”, ”rigorous standards” and “stimulus”, Humphrys and Silverton’s unblinking, prime-time examination of filth came as a gust of fresh air.

You can listen to the full Silverton-Humphrys encounter on the BBC website. There’s also a glowing review of Filthy English in The Observer.