Picking up This Record Is Not To Be Broadcast, the three-disc compilation of songs once banned, if only briefly, by the BBC and compiled by DJ Spencer Leigh (on Acrobat Music), I heard one of the four self-made Yorkshire millionaires in the Monty Python sketch rasping into my ear, 'Young people today, what do they know about censorship?' It brought back astonishing memories of my 30 years at the Corporation (there was a great generational divide between the Reithians who called the BBC the Corporation and the anti-Reithians who called it the BBC) and of growing up having the stiff-collared arbiters of public morality at Broadcasting House decide what we'd hear. The oddest bans imposed by the wonderfully named Dance Music Policy Committee were insisted upon by the composer Sir Arthur Bliss, who sought to suppress pop music inspired by classical themes such as 'I'm Always Chasing Rainbows' (from Chopin) by Perry Como. Some records were barred from being spun at certain times - 'Deep in the Heart of Texas' could not be played during the Second World War on programmes that might be heard by factory workers, who might neglect their lathes to join in the song's clapping routine.

One of the favourite records of my schooldays was Stan Freberg's 'John and Marsha', a 1951 novelty number featuring dreamy music and just the words 'John' and 'Marsha'. It was played week after week on Jack Jackson's Sunday night record show until someone twigged that the piece followed the course of coitus from pre to post. Was this ban the doing of the Director of the Spoken Word? Or the work of that phantom figure (invented, I think, by Stephen Potter), the Director of the Unspoken Word?

Everyone was a censor at the BBC in its Golden Days. I recall getting a pile of transcripts of interviews I'd recorded in San Francisco in 1965 with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth et al, in which every few lines the secretary making the transcription broke in with the capitalised observation: 'THIS IS UNFIT FOR BROADCASTING'.