Changes needed in TV programs

I don't remember exactly when I stopped watching most television comedians, sit-coms, series and many dramas. It didn't happen all at once, but came on gradually when explicit sex and corruption began to dominate so many programs with a permissive, it's okay attitude - not just implied sex as when Rhett Butler swept Scarlet O'Hara into his arms and started up the stairs in Gone With the Wind, but explicit sex where little or nothing is left to the imagination.

Comedians like Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, The Marx Brothers and Carol Burnett's gags, for example, were generally clean, clever and fun. Occasionally, one might have just a touch of innuendo, but it wasn't a plain dirty joke as so many are today.

Today the forte of most comedians are sex jokes, raw ones of the kind that were said to be told "out behind the barn."

I remember Hollywood's "Hayes Office" that kept, or tried to keep, moral standards in movies so a parent didn't have to worry about what their children were seeing in movies. They were sometimes called prudish, but it was far better than the anything goes lack of morals so prevalent in both screened and televised movies shown today where couples tear each other's clothes off and hop into bed. What follows then leaves almost nothing to the imagination. Actually, it is pornography - soft porn - perhaps, but it's nothing children should watch.

Movies like these and the society that allows them to flourish seem to encourage promiscuity, and the lower moral and ethical standards so prevalent in today's society.

Anyone complaining is often told, "But everyone does it," whether it's about sex, lying, stealing, cheating, or any of the many vices open to mankind.

Not everyone subscribes to the lying, cheating and chicanery we see around us and we don't want television or other media garbage polluting our lives or that of family or friends.