The BBC's director of music, Sir Arthur Bliss, wrote instructions during World War II advising the committee to ban songs "which are slushy in sentiment" or "pop" versions of classical pieces, such as " I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" from the 1918 Broadway show Oh, Look!, which made use of Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war.
Files in the BBC's Written Archives Centre in Caversham, Berkshire that are now available for public inspection show that the Dance Music Policy Committee, set up in the 1930s, took its role as Britain's cultural guardian seriously: one 1942 directive read: On occasion the BBC has seen fit to prevent certain pieces of music from being broadcast if it was felt that these recordings were unsuitable for the British public. In recent years, The Kunts have had 3 top 10 singles in the Christmas charts that the BBC refused to play, or even mention in their chart rundowns. Judge Dread had all of his 11 singles that entered the UK Singles Chart banned by the BBC, which is the most for any one artist. Some songs were banned for only a limited period, and have since received BBC airplay, while others were banned many years after having been first aired, as was the case of the Cure's " Killing an Arab", ABBA's " Waterloo", Queen's " Killer Queen", the Boomtown Rats' " I Don't Like Mondays" and 67 other songs which were banned from BBC airplay as the first Gulf War began. During its history the corporation has banned songs from a number of high-profile artists, including Cliff Richard, Frank Sinatra, Noël Coward, the Beatles, Ken Dodd, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, the BBC Dance Orchestra, Tom Lehrer, Glenn Miller, and George Formby. This article lists songs and whole discographies which have been banned by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) over the years.
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