UnNews:"Feck" deemed non-offensive

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

11 December 2008

Father Jack, the 'sensitive, caring one' from the series.

United Kingdom -- Fans of the fecking hilarious Channel Four TV show Father Ted have been familiar with the word feck ever since the fecking series - in which three Catholic priests have been sent to the fecking remote Craggy Island parish situated somewhere on Ireland's Atlantic coast for various misdemeanours - first aired back in 1995. A stroke of fecking genius by the show's creators, substituting feck for the swear word fuck allowed them to write scripts in which the characters could use the term regularly without the show being deemed offensive by fecking broadcasting standards authorities.

The show came to an abrupt end in 1998 when the actor Dermot fecking Morgan, who played lead character Father Ted Crilly, died aged 45. However, feck had, by this point, entered the English language and can still be heard in conversation every fecking day. However, controversy arose when Magners - producer of the lemonade-flavoured cidery type stuff of the same name popular amongst those who don't like cider - recently chose to use the word in a TV advert featuring a fecking farmer who is bothered by a swarm of bees; in the advert, he is heard to exclaim, "Feck off, bees!" Despite the fact that the word has not previously been considered problematic, a bunch of stupid fecking tets got pessed off about it and being the moaning wenkers that they are, complained to the bleedy Advertising Standards Authority.

Concerned viewer Mary Shitehouse claimed that the fecking advert was likely to give young people the message that swearing is acceptable. "I know that words of this type exist, and are used commonly by a certain class of people," she told us, shuddering, "but I don't understand why it is that I must be forced to hear them when I watch television. We must not allow our children to grow up speaking in this way, and it's really not difficult to prevent that. My own children don't, so whenever I hear other children doing so I feel I ought to get involved and give them some good advice on how they ought to bring up their offspring." Mrs. Shitehouse's son Matthew, aged seven, told us, "Oh, you don't want to go listening to that stupid old betch. She doesn't know shet about anything, she's full of crep. Nobody gives a flying tess about swearing nowadays."

However, the ASA has found in favour of Magners, ruling that neither the advert nor the fecking word are offensive. "The use of the word 'feck' in Britain has been popularised by TV programmes such as Father Ted," said a spokesman for the authority. "We considered that the tone of the ad was not aggressive or threatening. The term 'feck' was unlikely to be seen as a swear word." He later added, "This is not a precedent-setting decision and I certainly hope that this does not start a free-for-all with advertisers thinking they can use this all the time."

Lucky there was no mention of news services, eh? The bestard fecking cents.

Sources

• "Ad Complainers Told To 'Feck Off'" SkyNews, Dec 10, 2008