Komrade Winston Churchillski wrote:I assume Benny Hill was banned in the Soviet Union?
He wasn't banned, they just didn't show him on the only three existing government channels, so we didn't know he even existed. That was until the 1990s, when commercial TV started showing everything. Benny Hill became quite popular; at least my kids loved him.
The only British show ever shown on Soviet TV was BBC's 1967 "The Forsyte Saga" (I guess it reinforced the unattractiveness of bourgeois morals). There has never been a single American TV show on our TV. In the late 1980s, however, they also started showing endless Mexican melodramas that span over several hundred episodes, and that became a huge sensation because the Soviets never saw soap operas before and were mesmerized.
When the USSR fell apart in the 1990s, things went out of control and commercial TV began to show everything worth showing and even not worth showing, including erotic movies during day time when children could be watching. All sort of cheap low-budget garbage out of Hollywood that no normal person would waste time watching was sucked into the former USSR like with a gigantic vacuum cleaner, and spewed out of our TV screens.
I think it's a little more regulated now, but until now there seems to be no distinction among the audiences between A-grade, B-grade, and C-grade movies. In part it's because you can't tell how good or bad the acting is if it's in a foreign language, when De Niro, Schwarzenegger, John Cleese, or Morgan Freeman speak all in the same voice. So American culture is judged by some of the trashy movies no one here has ever heard of.
My sister, who lives in Siberia, told me she liked the Simpsons and that it was much better than the shows coming from America. I told her the Simpsons was an American show. She was surprised because she said it was distinctly different from the dumb and crass American comedies she saw on TV. What comedies? She named a few and I never heard of them. Must be some low-budget independent productions.
In summary, I wouldn't trust a foreigner's opinion of the American culture because it can be based on bizarre and outlandish ideas, skewed by trashy low-budget movies that no one in America has ever heard of, but in that country they are considered mainstream.
I guess that may partially explain the fear and hatred of the West by Middle-Eastern Muslims who have watched too many trashy, completely unbelievable movies packed with gore, cheap erotica, and toilet humor.
