GATINEAU – An airing of Radio-Canada’s "Fric show" which examined the porn industry – complete the nudity and frank language – at 7:30 p.m. was a poor decision, the CRTC told CBC this week.
In a decision released Tuesday, the Commission found that by airing the program on April 26 2007 before 9 p.m., the CBC did not meet the Canadian broadcasting policy objective set out in the Broadcasting Act that programming should be of high standard.
The Fric show is produced by the CBC and hosted by Marc Labrèche. It’s not a public affairs or news program but rather a program that mixes fiction, information, verified facts and sketches, all presented in a humorous, sarcastic, caustic and entertaining tone. It addresses overconsumption in various areas of everyday life (waste management, mass tourism, death, infants, weight-loss diets, etc.). Each week, during the program, the characters use humour and irony to debate a social phenomena.
This time it focused on the pornography industry and despite viewer advisories on the program’s content, the fact that it had “scenes of nudity appear frequently throughout the half-hour broadcast: front and back views of nude women, explicit sexual relations, covers of pornographic magazines, scenes from the Internet of nudity and explicit sexuality (e.g., fellatio), and the actual filming of a pornographic movie (explicit sexual relations, scenes of female clitoral masturbation, cunnilingus, etc.),” and aired before 9 p.m. – the so-called “watershed hour” where little tykes are presumed to be in bed, it violated the policy objective, said the Commission.
