IT IS astonishing how seriously the BBC take their role as the moral custodians of pop music. The list of artists banned from the Beeb which now includes Kneecap also includes the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Abba and Queen. Being banned by the Beeb does not seem to do your career any harm.

The BBC’s censorship of popular music goes all the way back to its foundation. In the 1930s some of the all-time great performers of popular music such as Noel Coward and Bing Crosby fell foul of the censors. Anything that had an element of sexual innuendo like George Formby’s “Little Stick of Blackpool Rock,” was for the chop.

Of course, nowadays Formby is something of hero on the left for being thrown out of South Africa for refusing to play to segregated audiences.

Coward, with a joke at his own expense, wrote in his 1930 play Private Lives, “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is!” A concept the BBC have taken to heart and have fretted about that power ever since.

One of the most extraordinary eras of censorship was in the second world war. Sir Arthur Bliss served as director of music at the BBC from 1942 to 1944, laying the foundations for the launch of the Third Programme after the war. As director of music, Bliss wrote instructions during the war advising the censorship 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 Frederic Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu.

Other songs based on classical music themes that were later banned by the committee due to “distortion of melody, harmony and rhythm” were the Cougars’ 1963 single “Saturday Nite at the Duck-Pond,” which used music from Swan Lake, and “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” from the 1953 musical Kismet, which was based on the second movement of Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet in D. Sometimes I wish I had the ability to ban music on the grounds of taste. But really...

In the 1950s with the coming of the teenager there was a long struggle against anything of a vaguely sexual nature. Victims included Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. References to God and religion where also frowned upon. Dylan’s song “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was banned in 1962, as it included the phrase, “God-almighty world.”

Smut had to be kept off the airwaves at all costs and I’m sure we all remember the banning of 1984’s Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. As the late great Ian Dury pointed out “sex and drugs and rock n’roll is all my brain and body needs.” Well, you have to have your rock and roll without sex or drugs at the Beeb. They also banned Dury’s references to disability in “Spasticus Autisticus” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads in 1981.

When it comes to drugs, proximity is enough. In February 1956, the NME reported that the theme for the film The Man with the Golden Arm, recorded by Eddie Calvert, was banned — and it was an instrumental. A BBC spokesman reported: “The ban is due to its connection with a film about drugs.”

More recently as the first Gulf war began, the BBC deemed our ears too sensitive for a large range of songs and banned them from their radio stations for the duration of the war. The list of 67 banned songs was published by New Statesman and Society in conjunction with Channel 4.

The songs included “War” by Edwin Starr (1970), “War Baby” by Tom Robinson (1982), “Warpaint” by The Brook Brothers (1961), and “Waterloo” — ABBA (1974). I am wondering if having war in the title might be a bit of a clue.

One of the funniest bans was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s 1980 anti-war song “Enola Gay.” A ban was applied only to its airing on the BBC’s children’s programming, as some within the organisation perceived the word “gay” as a corrupting sexual influence. They didn’t seem to mind the corrupting influence of dropping atom bombs on Japanese cities.

After the death of the hugely unpopular Margaret Thatcher on April 8 2013, anti-Thatcher sentiment prompted campaigns on social media which propelled the song “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” to number two on the UK Singles Chart. On April 12, 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. We got the Ding but not the Dong.

Now Kneecap and Bob Vylan join the ranks of artists whose careers have been enhanced by being banned by the BBC. Strange that the Beeb feels this need to protect people from any issue of substance in pop music when they are covered extensively in other genres all the time without the blink of an eye.

This is a class issue and has echoes of the 1960 prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing DH Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When prosecuting, Mervyn Griffith-Jones began by urging the jury, “Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

Quite rightly the jury threw that case out — and we should too.