During its history, the corporation has banned songs from a number of high-profile artists, including Cliff Richard, Frank Sinatra, Noël Coward, the Beatles, Ken Dodd, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, the BBC Dance Orchestra, Tom Lehrer, Glenn Miller, and George Formby.
[4] Files in the BBC's Written Archives Centre in Caversham, Berkshire that are now available for public inspection show that the Dance Music Policy Committee, set up in the 1930s, took its role as Britain's cultural guardian seriously: one 1942 directive read: We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war.
[4]The BBC's director of music, Sir Arthur Bliss, wrote instructions during World War II advising the committee to ban songs "which are slushy in sentiment" or "pop" versions of classical pieces, such as "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" from the 1918 Broadway show Oh, Look!, which made use of Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu.
[5] In February 1956, the British music magazine NME reported that the theme for the film The Man with the Golden Arm, recorded by Eddie Calvert, was also banned.
[21] In the case of songs that the BBC deemed politically controversial, many were not banned outright and were instead placed on a "restricted" list, in order that they not be used in "general entertainment programmes".
[5] After the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher on 8 April 2013, anti-Thatcher sentiment prompted campaigns on social media platforms which resulted in the song "Ding-Dong!
[22] On 12 April, Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said that the station's chart show would not play the song in the usual format, but that a short snippet would be aired as part of a news item.
A list of 67 banned songs was published by New Statesman and Society in conjunction with British public-service television broadcaster Channel 4.