Who gives a f*** about swearing on TV

That erudite and precisely spoken quizmaster Robert Robinson used to tell a story about Kenneth Tynan, the first man to use the f-word on British television. A rather grand elderly woman approached him at a party a few weeks after the incident. Tynan feared the worse, but she wanted to thank him. She had, she said, never heard the word before: “But now I use it all the time.”

Forty years on, everybody does, even on television. Anyone who watches Wife Swap will have long since concluded that variations of “f***” are now the only intensifiers in town. Indeed some people seem to swear more on screen than off. I have never met Gordon Ramsay, but those who have say he rarely swears in private. One of his programmes is called The F Word. Despite the hilarious ambiguity that F may stand for food, his catchphrase is “f***”.