OTTAWA – A promo spot for a kids program that showed one brother kicking another is not too violent for television, the CBSC has ruled.
The 15 second spot aired on January 27, 2008 on YTV in promotion of Naked Brothers Band, a scripted program about two real-life brothers who form a pop band. In the spot, one brother is shown dressed in a chicken suit and clowning around in front of the other brother, to the amusement of others. He falls down – and is then kicked by his brother.
The CBSC received a complaint from a viewer who felt that this type of violence was not appropriate for children’s programming. YTV explained that the promo was reflective of the sibling rivalry found in the Naked Brothers Band program, and that the kick was not particularly brutal or intense. While the CBSC’s National Specialty Service’s Panel thought the scene was a poor choice for inclusion in a promo for a kids show, it found no breach of the broadcasters’ code.
“The Panel simply does not view the off-screen kicking of one brother dressed in a chicken suit by the other brother as sufficiently violent to constitute a breach of any prohibition included in Article 2 of the Violence Code,” reads the decision.
“This is not to say that the Panel views the message flowing from, or reflected in, the brotherly kick as positive or friendly. It does not. It does understand, though, that siblings often scuffle. It fully appreciates that the best thing that could be said about the kick is that it was in bad taste and a lousy choice of what to air during a program aimed at under-12s, but the worst thing that could be said about it does not go so far as to breach the Code.”
