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In 1978 I was a teenager and one afternoon switched on the local ITV channel — Tyne Tees — at about 5.15pm to watch the US sitcom Mork and Mindy. However I nearly fell off my chair when it turned out that the episode was all about their evil landlord who was called ‘Arnold Wanker’.
Although a Wikipedia page about the word claims that the show was severely edited by ITV when it was shown (and wrongly calls him ‘Oliver’), the word certainly wasn’t cut in the north-east. I can only imagine no one at Tyne Tees had viewed the episode before screening it!