British TV censors OK gay kiss

BBC News reports that over 160 complaints about a gay kiss between two policemen in uniform on a TV drama aired before 9 p.m. have been rejected by the United Kingdom's Independent Television Commission. The scene was featured in the ITV1 police drama The Bill and featured a kiss between Police Constable Luke Ashton (played by Beautiful Thing's Scott Neal) and Sgt. Craig Gilmore. Viewers complained that children could have been watching at 8 p.m., when the program aired, but the TV regulator said that no programming rules had been broken. The regulator's ruling stated that the program code does not distinguish between the sexual orientation of the characters and that the kiss itself was not explicit nor totally unexpected.