Censorship of Top Gear (2002-) on PlutoTV
Posted: January 16th, 2023, 11:40 am
The automotive/wrenchhead/self-indulgent man-cave that is: Top Gear (2002-) is available now on: PlutoTV for viewing for free with advertisements. Individual episodes can be watched: On Demand and there is a dedicated channel on which they loop the entire series. I will warn that using: PlutoTV On Demand can cause excessive advertisements and occasional lock-up as it searches for targeting information.
I would not usually speak in public of one of my guilty pleasures but I have noticed an oddity of the censorship.
For those who do not know the series: it is three presenters demonstrating vehicles from supercars worth hundreds of thousands to family automobiles affordable by the average Brit. They do this with timed runs, strange races and insane stunts.
The frequency of coarse words varies from perhaps one per episode to one per second when the tall git is on a rant.
We have: Closed Captioning enabled at all times because it helps on occasion with thick accents and rapid patter.
The oddity which I noticed is that audio and CC are not the same. The CC for an episode wherein one of the team is supposedly stranded in sub-zero weather in the: Rockies while his mates quite leisurely race to his rescue shows statements such as: "BLEEPing idiots" and: "where the BLEEP are they?" The audio is never censored in any way and so the f-word is heard quite plainly at every use.
I have seen this effect in movies where the audio track, translated subtitle and Closed Captioning incrementally reduce the 'severity' of the language but this is my first experience with it in a television programme. It is the first time also that I have seen CC substitute the f-word with: "BLEEP".
I suspect that this is not sufficiently of interest to motivate any person to watch it in hopes of seeing the effect but I will warn that you should perhaps wait a few days. They loop the entire series and I see this morning that they are in the years after the good presenters left and the programme has been sanitized, homogenized and purified for your protection. It will be necessary to wait until they reach the end of those episodes and begin again with the first years to see the fun and interesting version.
I would not usually speak in public of one of my guilty pleasures but I have noticed an oddity of the censorship.
For those who do not know the series: it is three presenters demonstrating vehicles from supercars worth hundreds of thousands to family automobiles affordable by the average Brit. They do this with timed runs, strange races and insane stunts.
The frequency of coarse words varies from perhaps one per episode to one per second when the tall git is on a rant.
We have: Closed Captioning enabled at all times because it helps on occasion with thick accents and rapid patter.
The oddity which I noticed is that audio and CC are not the same. The CC for an episode wherein one of the team is supposedly stranded in sub-zero weather in the: Rockies while his mates quite leisurely race to his rescue shows statements such as: "BLEEPing idiots" and: "where the BLEEP are they?" The audio is never censored in any way and so the f-word is heard quite plainly at every use.
I have seen this effect in movies where the audio track, translated subtitle and Closed Captioning incrementally reduce the 'severity' of the language but this is my first experience with it in a television programme. It is the first time also that I have seen CC substitute the f-word with: "BLEEP".
I suspect that this is not sufficiently of interest to motivate any person to watch it in hopes of seeing the effect but I will warn that you should perhaps wait a few days. They loop the entire series and I see this morning that they are in the years after the good presenters left and the programme has been sanitized, homogenized and purified for your protection. It will be necessary to wait until they reach the end of those episodes and begin again with the first years to see the fun and interesting version.