Can I get any of you Cu....ocks a drink....

Above: The proper bad finger from the international 48 Hours poster.

Last Sunday was a great night for comedy. There was the great Extras episode with Bowie,
Catch Bowie being effortlessy funny towards the end of this documentary (yeah! you and whose army). Then there was Shaun of the Dead and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (still crack up at Good Will Hunting II: Hunting Season, 'I don't like them one bit'). Christ just found Kevin Smith's missus has done a three-hour making of doc, 'Oh, What a Lovely Tea Party'.

Anyway, I nearly fell off my chair when Nick Frost's great first full line in Shaun of the Dead, "Can I get any of you cunts a drink?" was redubbed as "Can I get any of you cocks a drink?" on ITV2. I was taken back to watching things like 48 Hours or Beverly Hills Cop with lots of 'frigs' and 'freakins' dubbed over, which I was always found more offensive than the swear words, because it was usually done by some middle England ITV monkey doing a really bad Eddie Murphy voice. It also created a mini genre of sketch comedy, cf Hale and Pace (no really), Harry Enfield (surprised no one's put up the 'mother funster. did you fun my wife etc. sketch) and Mad TV. On film there are some things that Americans are just better at on screen than the British, Swearing, hard core pornography and violence. Hopefully ITV never show Dead Man's Shoes: "What are you looking at...You, you cantalope..."

This madness also extended to the TV Times when they reproduced the poster of 48 Hours with the middle finger badly airbrushed off! so Murphy was just shaking a badly drawn fist at an inexplicable angle. When bad airbrushing was out of the question movie posters took a turn for the more bizarre when they used other fingers that no one else uses to mean what we think they mean without offending idiots: witness Committed and The Family Stone . This sort of mealy mouthed attempt to shock but not really really grinds my gears.