One can well imagine _home_ affairs regarding pornography as a "scourge" - affairs elsewhere are far more likely to take a more enlightened view, unburdened by domestic drudgery - but the mind boggles at the thought of all the broken roads, run down schools, underpaid nurses and choked bandwidth, while money is spent convening special hearings (this, apparently, was not the first) on pornography. I have no idea how many people sit on this committee - three people are quoted in the article - but their time is presumably not cheap. And, while matters of national import topple off the bottom of an ever-increasing to-do list, they sit and froth about e-tv showing some steamy movies at a time when only the most hardened insomniacs would be likely to be watching.
Personally, I'd also like to put e-tv on the carpet for showing Emanuelle MMDMXVIII or Butterscotch - The Invisible Alien Stochastic Ooze Lover Who Came In From The Cold, but on the grounds of the (appalling lack of) artistic merit in these films rather than because of any silicone-enhanced flesh wobbled before our eyes. There are plenty of films which are both erotic and watchable, but I suppose they would cost rather more, and since only the truly desperate would be watching at 2am, Marcel Golding must be asking himself, what would the point be?
But, perhaps, to approach a point, rather than simply wheeling yet another hobbyhorse out of the stable to take the air - what does any of this have to do with us, here in our sun-drenched ivory tower? Well, perhaps more than we think. The grapevine is thrumming with stories of a staff member recently disciplined for downloading pornography during work time, the "crime" I suppose being that he was "wasting" the bandwidth on streamed footage (or whatever body part comes to mind) of sex rather than cricket, as is the institutional norm. And, as we know, despite our Statement of Values calling for us to love, and enjoy life, this doesn't stretch to enjoying anything corporeal, and most certainly not anything carnal. This man's crime was that he not only enjoys sex, but he refuses to hide the fact and pretend, like everyone else, to prefer cricket.