Apparently Ofcom is receiving hundreds of complaints about Channel 4’s Bringing Up Baby. The programme features controversial baby-raising guidance and related experiments. Whatever…

We’ve written about this in the past (and made some videos: 1, 2, 3) — it’s often the case that people are able to waste Ofcom’s time with silly complaints. These complaints are silly in the sense that radio and television are probably filled with things people disagree with, but only a tiny minority of people feel entitled to have a public regulator spend its time and resources to issue an adjudication on the matter at hand. When it drafted the Communications Act 2003 it was clear that Parliament wanted to reduce the role of public regulation to adjudicate broadcast complaints as we entered the era of multichannel abundance. But some people don’t seem to have received that message.

Case in point: Some group — ‘Social Baby‘ — write on their website:

‘It is therefore of the utmost importance that complaints either make reference to, or clearly indicate which part of the [Ofcom Broadcast] code you feel has been broken. This will be key to the success or otherwise of any complaints.

There is a major problem with this. The Code makes no reference to infants or babies (that I can find), which I suspect leaves a loophole for programme makers and broadcasters to produce what they wish without regulation.’

Listen, if these geniuses think that the children in the programme are somehow being harmed, they can call the social services. Or if they think the guidance provided in the programmes is awful, they can make public rebuttals — or their own broadcast production.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, not a broadcast code adjudication…