These restrictions sometimes explain why we can’t always tell the stories we want to. And they even limit the way we tell stories. For example we can’t show any blood or weapons such as a gun or knife used for violence or threat. We also can’t show a syringe, or any blood on someone after an accident which limits the way we can show and tell our action and medical stories, and often means we simply can’t tell a lot of stories.
Restrictions also impact our dialogue. For example we can’t use words such as ‘sex’ more than a certain number of times over one week, because the frequency of particular words also has an overall impact. You may have noticed that when our characters decide to make their relationship physical, that instead of saying ‘we are going to sleep together’ or ‘do you want to have sex?’ we used phrases such as ‘taking the relationship to the next level’ and ‘are you ready?’.
Every episode is checked over both at the script and image stages by a censor to make sure that we stick exactly to the G Classification. Sometimes we have to go back and change things to make sure it’s okay.
A program such as Home and Away on the other hand, that has a later timeslot and therefore a PG classification, has more flexibility in the imagery, dialogue, and content that they can show and therefore use to tell their stories.
All the best,
Susan
Neighbours Classified!
29/10/2009 9:00 AM
Hi Everyone, it’s Susan here again.
I thought you might be interested to know that as a G classified program, Neighbours content must adhere to stringent restrictions because of our 6.30pm timeslot which puts us into a special program time-zone category and dictates our classification to G.
