Fire up the blur tool, that dude's smoking!

I noticed last night that cigarettes were blurred in sketches on The Soup on E!. So were guns (we assume they were toys gun and have no idea if they were realistic toys or even Barbie pink plastic). So in a country where you could almost surely show a closeup of someone getting a Brazilian wax after 9pm, you can't show someone holding a cigarette or a gun at 7pm? I've also noticed that Comedy Central bleeps "dumbass" on "That 70s Show" (and if you watch the show, you know that's practically Red's pet name for his son, so the bleeps are flying).

One of the things I like about Brit TV is that they don't seem to chop up and censor everything. You can actually watch a movie or an old episode of Sex and The City on non-premium channels and see it uncut and unedited, which beats the hell out of what most U.S. stations do. All of which makes it seem all the odder when they won't show a guy holding a cigarette! The blurs even make things seem nastier, because when you see a man with something blurred in front of his mouth, you wonder what could be so filthy they had to blur it -- until you realize he's smoking. We're in Bizarro World.