X-Rated: The Pop Videos They Tried To Ban (C4); The Ancient Greek Olympics (C4): Questions need to be answered. Why did the chicken cross the road? Why do fools fall in love? Why is Jason, the king of preen, still in the Big Brother house? And why do people think that by banning something it will go away?

X-Rated: The Pop Videos They Tried To Ban demonstrated how these things can backfire, by showing that controversy is a very useful tool to sell records.

Before music videos, the naughtiest it got was Pan's People gyrating on Top Of The Pops or Bucks Fizz having their skirts ripped off while singing a Eurovision song. Even the first pop videos were innocuous, making heavy metal rockers Black Sabbath look like students.

While Queen introduced music videos to the nation, it took the foppish New Romantics known as Duran Duran to inject sauciness into the genre, with Girls On Film, although scenes of a semi-clad girl sliding on a cream-covered pole would win no prizes for subtlety.

And so we began a journey that encompassed nudity, violence, revolting sex, buckets of blood, blasphemy, lesbian scenes, mutilation, drugs, suicide and dwarves smearing themselves with raw meat - everything, as someone far wiser than me once said, that makes life worth living.

The more groups and singers courted controversy, the more records they sold. If it hadn't have been for DJ Mike Reid, Frankie Goes To Hollywood might never have achieved the success they did. He was responsible for the banning of their single, Relax. The video featured sado-masochistic gay club culture and references to gay sexual practices that probably meant nothing to most people in 1984, when such things were still mostly in the closet. The result of the ban was inevitable - the record went to number one.

TV coverage of the first Olympic Games would have alarmed the clean-up campaigners too, because competitors competed in the nude. Despite our supposedly enlightened times both C4's The Ancient Greek Olympics and BBC2's Olympic documentary last week came over all shy about showing men's dangly bits, either placing objects in front of the offending parts or, in C4's case, having the athletes recreating the games wearing pouches.

If you could have done, it would have been more comfortable watching those earliest games in the ancient world on the telly as the heat, dust and overcrowding on the spot would have been intolerable. There was a joke that unruly slaves were punished not with a beating but a trip to Olympia.

The games were crammed into five days and half of that was spent on sacrifice and worship, which these days have been replaced by commercial breaks and endless chatter by so-called expert commentators.

The ancient games were not only naked but very violent, so extreme that "to all but the most psychopathic would be chilling". There were stories about a boxer who swallowed teeth knocked out by a punch so his opponent wouldn't see his distress and about a wrestler who was disembowelled by a stab to his stomach.

With all this nudity and violence, it began to sound like a pop video they tried to ban.

Published: 26/07/2004