Its the same here. I haven't heard a bleep for a long time.

With television there is a 9pm watershed which means that the language should be suitable for a family audience before that time. There has never been a similar rule for radio, so it tends to be down to the individual programme.

They ran a series of "alternative" comedy radio shows at around six pm. Whilst the material from the same comic at 11pm would include more adult material, it didn't seem particularly censored for language.

It used to be considered to be funny to include a long string of f-words in a comedian's act, because it was meant to be challenging. Wasn't Lenny Bruce an exponent of that? These days, in the main, people have got bored with it and have, in general moved on to finding other things funny. Comedy used to be happily racist and sexist, the f-words just replaced all those "mother-in-law" jokes that no-one would dare tell any more. I think we've absorbed most of that now and want to move on.

There is a much greater commitment to realism now, rather than hiding behind the idea that everything is "nice". If the programme is about prisons or dockyards it uses the language that is found there without making a judgement.