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Hackney Council: Do they show anything obscene, or swear words, or… ?The posters feature a man in a pig mask, and they also feature a man castrating a sheep with his mouth.
Well, that's why they're blacked out then.Would they not have got through some sort of screening stage initially?
Hold on… Hold the line.OK!…Hackney Council: Right, so, how do you know the council has done this?We saw two guys in hi-vis Hackney council jackets doing it.
It's most likely [the] enforcement [department]. Someone's probably called up to complain about obscene or offensive content and it's been blacked out because of that. I don't know whether you can discuss the matter with them. Clearly some images are not suitable for children to walk past, so anyone with children would probably call up to complain. Do you want to speak to enforcement?
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Hackney Council Enforcement: What kind of poster was it?It was a white poster. One had a photo of a man in a pig mask. Another said, "Sheep are being castrated" above a photo of a man castrating a sheep with his mouth and–
Oh! Okay, something to do with the sheep – I see. I do know that someone did complain about that. Obviously it had nothing to do with me, but someone did call. So that's probably why. But has it been blacked out completely?Not completely; most of it's blacked out on the bottom half, but it looks like they couldn't reach the top half properly and just sort of stopped.
Hmm. I don't think Hackney Council would have done that. Let me just find out.….Hello again – I spoke to a member of the enforcement team and she said that she's not sure who did it, but it wasn't one of them. An officer is actually due to go out and look at the posters because they only just got the complaints today. What she said is that if it was the council they wouldn't have blacked it out, they'd have removed it completely.Okay. So who was it?
I don't know, to be quite honest.Okay then. We'll continue our investigation. Thanks!Our initial plan was to ask Hackney council to explain what exactly was wrong with each one of these things:
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- The word "HARDCORE"
- The word "CASTRATION"
- The words "VICELAND", "Sky Channel 153" and "Now TV"
- A photo of a man castrating a sheep with his mouthBut as you can probably surmise from the transcripts of our conversations, that wasn't going to happen, because nobody really seemed 100 percent sure why the posters had been blacked out, or even if Hackney council staff were responsible.So what had happened? Were these rogue council officials taking matters into their own hands, deciding what the people of Shoreditch can and cannot see, like propaganda agents from the DPRK? Were they incredibly unimaginative street artists who'd somehow got hold of Hackney council hi-vis jackets?We just don't know, so here are a couple of absolute guesses as to who the culprits might be: