THE difficulty with joining the debate on the “pornification” of childhood is that you immediately sound like a humourless out-of-touch prude.

Perhaps the debate of the last few days has eased that difficulty because it has shown that there is a weight of shared opinion that the blitz of images that is bombarding our children is potentially harmful.

Yet it is only a short step from a weight of shared opinion to a “moral majority” which, in the US, politicised the debate into a right-wing attempt to crack down on anything slightly risque or unconventional.

The Government yesterday looked a little awkward over its reluctance to press the matter to the point of legislation, but it is probably right. It is difficult to see how you can draw up a legally watertight scale that rates sexual content so that you can get away with two sexual content points on a billboard advert and five on a post-watershed TV programme.

And so, common sense must come into play.

It is common sense that girls as young as nine should not be wearing push-up lacy bras and it is good that nine of the biggest high street stores – Asda, Debenhams, Argos, John Lewis, Next, Marks and Spencer, Peacocks, Sainsbury’s and Tesco – have signed an agreement saying so.

Television should follow suit. Is it common sense that the most popular “family” programme of the moment, Britain’s Got Talent, should end with the middle-aged judges giving a standing ovation to a young lady who had just sung a terribly flimsy song about having her body touched and about how “me like the way that you kiss my yeah yeah yeah yeah me like it”.

There are other, even less appealing, lyrics to Nicole Scherzinger’s Right There but common sense suggests they are unnecessary in a family newspaper.

It is unfortunate that Simon Cowell and ITV didn’t subject their show to the same common sense test of decency.