In Sebastian Faulks’s terrific American novel On Green Dolphin Street, the heroine falls for the Sinatra-like journalist who romances her, partly because of his fancy fingerwork in the cigarette-tapping and match-flicking department in various Big Apple bars. Could JJ Hunsecker (played by Burt Lancaster) in Sweet Smell of Success have portrayed the monster gossip columnist half as well if he’d been banned by the 22 Hotel from sucking cigarettes (lit for him by his underling on the words, “Match me, Sidney”)? Hardly. Was there ever a three-time loser, stool pigeon or thwarted lover who walked into a bar to drown his sorrows and didn’t pull out a packet of Lucky Strikes to go with his 14 slugs of bourbon? No, there wasn’t. What were the factors that made him a danger to society?”Well? What were they?”Ah!” smiles Ivor Ketcham.

“To find out, you must wait for my series!”‘Depraved and Corrupted? Susceptible Censors’ comes to our screens in May
More from Miles Kington. “At the moment we are doing studies on families who have never had television, only radio, to find out if their behaviour patterns are significantly different.”But how could radio listening make anyone sadistic?”Well, then, how did the Marquis de Sade get sadistic in the first place? He lived at a time when there was no television or radio or films, only pictures in books. As recently as the 1920s and 1930s, radio was more powerful than any visual media. Radio was powerful enough to cause widespread panic with Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. Has anyone yet investigated the effect of pre-screen violence on people?”I’m sorry, pre-screen violence?”There is nobody now alive who can remember a time without television and films, yet there were such times.

Yet we never ask if films promote sentimental and saccharine behaviour!”Maybe that’s because we don’t think that would do any damage.”And maybe we are wrong to think so! Maybe a film that encourages a mother to mollycoddle her child or sentimentalise her partner is just as culpable as one that encourages violence!”Hmmm…”And another thing. So there you have an example of brutal behaviour wish-patterns being caused by lightweight comedy! The odd thing is that we always ask if television and films will promote violent behaviour But there are many films that are soppy and soft-centred. “The sense of humour of film censors tends to get lowered after a while, so that you might get a film censor laughing at an Adam Sandler film, after he had failed to laugh at the previous five or six of them, just as in the old days a film censor might find himself laughing at Norman Wisdom after 20 years’ straight-faced exposure.”On the other hand, I have discovered one or two film censors who had developed a secret desire to attack Adam Sandler and commit extreme forms of violence on him. “Our studies show that, if anything, film censors tend to drive more carefully than the average, going to work and back.”Why does he think that is?”Wouldn’t you drive carefully if you had a couple of raunchy Italian films to look forward to at work the next day?” winks Professor Ketcham.Was that a joke?”That’s another thing we’ve discovered,” says Professor Ketcham. Do film censors tend to drive more dangerously than other people? Do car chase films tend to deprave?”No,” says Professor Ivor Ketcham, who is lecturer in media misbehaviour at Milton Keynes, has always wanted his own television series and has got it at last. Or serious Spanish explorations of mother-fixation.”The filmed behaviour of drivers in American crime films is just as bad as any other kind of violence, so you might just as well ask whether film censors are influenced by car chases and whether film censors therefore tend to drive more recklessly and dangerously than other adults!”All right I will ask that.