“Big Brother” censored

The live daily telecasts of the hit reality show Big Brother on the U.K.’s digital channel E4 have easily become the most censored shows in TV history, the London Daily Mirror reported Thursday. Broadcast on a 10-minute delay to allow the station to screen conversations between the contestants in a house where TV cameras are trained on them throughout the day, the telecasts frequently include long segments in which no sound is heard at all. During one hour sampled by the Mirror, only 27 minutes was broadcast uncensored, with the sound cutting out more than 30 times. A spokesman for the British Broadcasting Standards Commission, an official watchdog, told the newspaper: “There is nothing in living memory as heavily bleeped as Big Brother.” Meanwhile, contestant Penny Ellis, whose employer, a private school, has threatened to fire her after she appeared briefly in the nude during a Big Brother telecast, said Wednesday that she will be probably quit. “I would be a lunatic [to return],” she said. “I wouldn’t get any work done. It’s best not to go back for the safety of the kids and the structure of the school.”