He is a garish shade of yellow, a menace to his teachers, a constant source of anguish for his family . . . and now deemed likely to corrupt the children of Venezuela, which has banished Bart Simpson and co from the airwaves.

“It had to be taken off,” a spokeswoman for Televen, a private television station, said of The Simpsons, after receiving an order from the National Telecommunications Commission. “They consider it to be a series that isn’t appropriate for that time, because it isn’t appropriate for children.”

Televen’s choice of replacement for the 11am slot might not be welcomed by the authorities either. In an effort to maintain ratings, it will broadcast Baywatch Hawaii, the 1990s show featuring a cast of swimsuit-clad women and muscle-bound lifeguards that a group of British mothers once condemned as soft porn.

The regulator, which claimed to have received complaints from viewers, did not specify which parts of Los Simpson were deemed offensive. However, it argued that broadcasting the cartoon series at that hour could constitute an infringement of rules banning any “messages that act against the education of boys, girls and adolescents”.

Televen said that it had not received any complaints about The Simpsons and was hoping to avoid losing viewers by replacing it with Baywatch Hawaii. “We are hoping it will continue to have a good rating, because The Simpsons worked very well – so much so that it had the highest levels of viewership for that morning timetable in the history of the channel,” Germán Pérez Nahim, the station’s general manager, said.

It is not always wise to cross the cartoon’s creators. George Bush Sr and his wife Barbara became frequent and unwilling characters on the show after the former President said that Americans should strive to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. The creators hit back by having the Simpsons watch the 1992 speech, with Bart objecting that they were, in fact, a lot like the Waltons – “we’re praying for the end of the Depression, too”.

President Chávez, Venezuela’s leader, has not pronounced on the Simpsons controversy, but on past form he does not respond well to mockery: he made his irritation known last week with a photo from the Reuters news agency in which he appeared in front of two black circles, making him look as if he were wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. State-controlled media attacked the picture as an act of “media terrorism”.

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