It was sometime around 3 a.m. and I’d been watching MTV (or, to be really precise, I’d had my TV switched to MTV; there’s a slight but crucial difference). I’d reached that rock video saturation point where I knew I couldn’t go round one more time with Quiet Riot terrorizing those sorry suburban kids whose idea of a party all night is pizza and Trivial Pursuit and I couldn’t face watching Madonna breath and undulate for at least another 24 hours. I flicked around the remote and, failing to come up with either Mothra or an old Robert Mitchum movie, I settled on CBS’s all-night news show Nightwatch. They were conducting a head to head debate between an individual named John Douglas, a spokesperson for a clean-up TV organization, Morality in Media, on one side and the TV critic of The Wall Street Journal on the other.

Douglas seemed fundamentally upset by the idea that people who weren’t married were depicted going to bed with each other in prime time. He appeared to want to censor just about everything from The A Team to All My Children and, as a general principle, reduce most of network TV to the level of Little House On The Prarie. I was about to change the channel again when the discussion turned to rock videos. At the very mention of the words, the man from Morality in Media started to look as though his shirt collar had suddenly become too tight. He clearly considered the rock video to be a work of the devil and beyond all toleration. He talked about whips, chains, blood and mutilation. The crime was made heinous by the fact that this dangerous garbage was watched by little children.