In American television circles, Ben Silverman is known as the king of the knock-offs. He tours the world looking for promising programmes that can be remade for a US audience. He snapped up the rights to The Office, and his all-American cast romped home with the 2006 Emmy for outstanding comedy series. Then he found a Spanish-language soap about an unfashionable worker at a fashion magazine and turned it into Ugly Betty, which won a Golden Globe for best TV comedy.

Yet even his admirers’ eyebrows rose when Silverman recently announced that his next conversion project would be an obscure BBC comedy called I’m with Stupid, about a homeless bum who moves in with a disabled friend. You could almost hear the shocked intake of collective breath as America’s television critics tried to figure out how they could possibly describe such a politically incorrect setup in ways that would not get them sacked. In a country where words such as “homeless” and “disabled” are fraught with political consequence — and you can’t use the s-word (for stupid) when referring to any kind of handicap — it was inevitable that the premise of Silverman’s comedy would become mangled in translation. The homeless bum was duly described as “an unlucky guy” or a “down-and-out”; his disabled friend became “a man who uses a wheelchair” and, in the Boston Herald, a “physically challenged man”.

Yet the critics’ verbal contortions failed to mask an intriguing reality: while America unarguably remains the most politically correct society on earth, a new, subversive spirit is transforming its entertainment networks. Political incorrectness is suddenly doing great at the box office. It is not just Simon Cowell slating competitors on American Idol (although he did get into hot water this year for telling one talent-impaired singer he looked like a “bush baby”). On both the left and the right wings, programme-makers are peppering the air-waves with a pleasingly rancid assault on comfortable audience complacencies.

Nobody has done more to defy polite television convention than Jack Bauer, the indestructible hero of 24, now in his sixth season of saving the world in 24 hour-long episodes. For most of those series, Bauer has gaily tortured and massacred his way across California in pursuit of an array of villains who only ever seem to talk once Jack has kneecapped them, cut off their fingers, electrocuted them or opened the dreaded brief-case full of excruciating hypodermic needles. As President Bush has repeatedly attempted to persuade America, it is bad guys such as Saddam Hussein who resort to the ultimate incorrectness of torture. Yet here was much of the country cheering from their sofas when their all-American hero, played with grim enthusiasm by Kiefer Sutherland, turned up the electrical charge and snarled at his victim: “Tell me what I need to know.”

This year, the series has been particularly gruesome, with Bauer attempting to suffocate his own brother and a terrorist adversary taking a power drill to the shoulder blade of one of Jack’s colleagues. (This is apparently known in torturing circles as the Black & Decker treatment.) It is mostly slapstick nonsense, of course, yet it emerged in a remarkable report in The New Yorker magazine last month that senior US military officials have become genuinely concerned because young soldiers heading for Iraq want to be like Bauer.

Last November, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, head of the US Military Academy at West Point, travelled to LA to complain to 24’s producers that they were promoting an erroneous view of torture, suggesting it was easy and effective — just drill a little deeper into that shoulder blade and your enemy is sure to crack. “The kids see it and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about 24?’ ” Finnegan said. He urged the producers to portray the reality of torture — that victims tell lies under pressure, and that it takes weeks or months to confirm any information they may have given.

“The problem with 24 is not that it justifies torture, but that it fosters the illusion that the American government is good at it,” wrote one New York television critic. “The practices at Abu Ghraib [the notorious Iraqi prison where inmates were abused by US guards to no useful intelligence effect] suggest the opposite.” The producers of 24 have announced that they will be toning down the

’torture for the rest of the series, doubtless to the dismay of the show’s bloodthirsty audience. Yet the vogue for politically incorrect television is sure to spread elsewhere.

Adult cartoon shows such as South Park and The Simpsons have long been regarded as the cutting edge of deliberately offensive humour, but these days they are far from alone. The success of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat film — and his Ali G television series, shown on HBO — suggests that American audiences are tiring of a relentless diet of politically correct cop shows in which the investigating team always seems to comprise one white, one black, one Hispanic and an occasional good Muslim.

The Comedy Central cable network recently launched The Sarah Silverman Program, a sitcom featuring one of America’s most foul-mouthed comedians. Silverman (no relation to Ben) is an attractive woman who flutters her eyelidsprettily while telling the most offensive jokes imaginable: her style has been dubbed “bile with a smile”. In an animated series called Minoriteam, one of the characters is said to possess “all the power of the Jewish faith and a volcano”. The character’s name is Jewcano.

If these developments seem minor to sophisticated European aesthetes, it’s worth recalling that America remains a nightmare for anyone outside the television world who makes a verbal slip. When Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican, used the word macaca — a mildly insulting French term — to describe one of his critics, he was promptly accused of racism and lost his reelection bid last year. In Santa Rosa, California, a 13-year-old Mormon schoolgirl named Rebekah Rice was sent to her head teacher for saying “That’s so gay” in class. She was accused of being derogative to homosexuals and issued with a formal warning. Her parents are now suing the school.

And in New York this month, city-council officials voted for a symbolic ban on the use of the n-word, despite an unresolved debate about whether it was more acceptable to say “nigga” than “nigger”. The n-word joined the k-word (kike), d-word (dago) and s-word (spic) as unmentionable in US newspapers, but heard every day on the streets. And that, according to Ben Silverman, is the main reason American television is becoming a bastion of incorrectness. Viewers may be tiring of squeaky-clean fictional stereotypes who never offend anyone. They don’t know anyone like that in real life. But they’ve all seen homeless bums, and they probably know someone disabled. Silverman is betting I’m with Stupid will be America’s next big hit.

The needle and the damage done: Kiefer Sutherland defends 24

‘24 is absolutely not — categorically not — a justification for torture. Those stories that the US army is worried about the torture sequences in our show? It should be a lot more worried about its behaviour in Abu Ghraib than about our television series. That’s ludicrous. I think the whole thing has been taken out of context. There was a conversation between the head of West Point [the military academy] and some human-rights activist groups — which we actually brought together. What we are interested in is the fact that it has become a debate on a very public level. That’s what’s fantastic about entertainment: it brings certain subjects into people’s conversations.

The fact is, we are a television show, and we use some of the torture sequences as a dramatic device to heighten tension. It is simply that. We are not saying, “This is the way the world should be, and we’re condoning this.”

On one level, there is reality to the show. Terrorism is a reality — and it has been since time began, in one aspect or another, whether it’s one tribe raiding another or the terrible events of 9/11. But there are so many things we do in the series that require an absolute suspension of disbelief in this conceit of the 24-hour day. To say that I support everything Jack Bauer does would be to say I support the suspension of due process, which is ridiculous.

You’ve got everyone from Newt Gingrich and John McCain on the right, and Barbra Streisand and the Clintons on the left, talking about the benefits of this show. What I get from that is that it’s balanced. We have [the producers] Howard Gordon representing the left and Joel Surnow representing the right — just like for every terrorist, there’s a freedom fighter.

My own politics? To a large degree, they’re private, but I believe — inherently — that we have a responsibility to take care of each other. So, socialised healthcare? Absolutely, that’s a no-brainer. Free universities? Again, that’s a no-brainer for me. I guess those are leaning towards socialist politics. To me, it’s common sense. And I do believe the wealthy have a responsibility toward the less fortunate. Some people call that communism. I disagree. Again, it’s common sense.

Kiefer Sutherland was talking to Stephen Armstrong

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