Silence of the Homers troubles TEN
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
Channel TEN has breached the Broadcasting Act by not being thorough enough with its captioning of Simpsons episodes.
The Australian Communication and Media Authority has found two episodes aired in May 2007 had inadequate captioning. Commercial television licensees must provide a captioning service for all television programs transmitted during prime viewing hours.
In two episodes of The Simpsons it was without captioning for 17 and 14 minutes respectively.
ACMA found that the poor quality in the 30-minute programs significantly affected its comprehensibility to a deaf or hearing impaired viewer.
TEN told ACMA there were significant mitigating factors in relation to the captioning service provided which it has since resolved. These mitigating factors arose from TEN’s implementation of new digital captioning processes and equipment in 2007. TEN has undertaken to continue to rigorously test and monitor this infrastructure and address any viewer feedback.
Source: ACMA.
5 Responses
I am a big relier on captioning and its not just the simpsons – ch10 has made some blunders with The Bold and the Beautiful, Ten News and an episode of Oprah all missed captioning.
Ch9 has a problem with captioning programs past 10:30pm (I’ve missed Survivor and The Apprentice because of this) and even Foxtel need to lift up their game and start captioning more programs – especially those that had captions when on Free Tv then moved to Pay (and I just happened to come across another episode of Oprah with Jamie Durie today that was not captioned after I had seen it on Ch10 earlier in the year with captions).
We are in the 21st century – all tv shows and dvd releases should have mandatory captioning for the hearing impaired.
Thanks ACMA and keep up the good work for the hearing impaired community!!!
Occasionally I turn on the captions when watching digital tv, and I think I can recall while watching The Simpsons in the past where the captions were shortened, but to the point it was taking the story out of context, and producing a story with holes. Sometimes substituting words, not always with he same meaning, more so to get the line through the screen faster. It’s odd, and becomes pointless to read when you can hear in the audio that it’s all wrong!
The word “ass” (in most cases) is perfectly acceptable under the G rating unless it is used excessively or aggressively (acceptable uses: to make an ass out of oneself, or to kick someone’s ass etc.)
However calling someone an asshole or to use the word frequently would most likely attract a PG rating. I don’t understand why TEN would have censored the word “ass” in that Futurama episode. 😐 Now I wish I HAD watched that episode just to see how badly TEN had butchered it.
.. It’s just like the 6.30pm Futurama episodes. One episode hinged on Bender saying his most commonly-used word ‘ass’ as a trigger to the bomb. They censored every reference to ‘ass’. I don’t know how the storyline even made sense.
(I realise that they had to do that for a 6.30 timeslow, but it shows they don’t appreciate the shows.)
I’ve been so annoyed about Simpsons captioning for a while now. The morons who caption these things strip all the witty, intertextual humour from the dialogue. The Simpsons isn’t about storyline per se. The dialogue has to be verbatim.
For God’s sake just download one of the many Simpsons scripts of the Internet, run it through an Australian filter to add ‘u’s, and even that will be better than the crap we have now.