OTTAWA – A comedy that included a young girl pole-dancing while being ogled by an adult male breached the broadcast codes prohibiting the sexualization of children, says the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC).
The CBSC investigated the final episode of Les beaux malaises broadcast on TVA on January 22, 2017 at 9:00 PM. Les beaux malaises is a comedy starring comedian Martin Matte playing a fictional version of himself. The very last scene of the entire series was unusual, as characters that had appeared throughout the program’s three-year run joined the regular characters as they danced. The scene also a showed a girl of about nine or ten years old in a bathing suit dancing around a pole, while a man emerged from giant inflatable buttocks and then watched the girl appreciatively while eating potato chips.
A viewer complained about this scene, which the CBSC’s French-Language Panel examined under the Exploitation clause of the CAB Equitable Portrayal Code. While the Panel recognized that the program was a humorous take on uncomfortable situations and that the final scene was a culmination of that theme, it found a code breach because the CBSC has consistently drawn the line at any material that sexualizes children, even in a nuanced or comedic way.
The complainant had also objected to scenes showing marijuana consumption and a transvestite, but the CBSC emphasized that broadcasters should be commended for presenting society in all its diversity. There are no code prohibitions against those depictions, particularly in a program aired at 9:00 PM.
The CBSC did, however, find code breaches for TVA’s failure to provide a classification icon at the beginning of the episode and to provide all advisories in both audio and video formats.
