TV Movie Editing

Can anyone explain this to me?

I was watching Star Trek: First Contact on Channel 4, and I couldn’t help noticing the very bad and inconsistent editing job they’d done. Removing certain lines that contain mild swearing, presumably due to the broadcast time (19:05-21:05). Examples of missing lines are:

• Lily Sloan’s “Bullshit!” and “You son of a bitch!”
• Zefram Cochrane’s “Sweet Jesus!” when he sees the Enterprise.

Yet they keep in:

• Scenes involving violence and death.
• Picard being poked in the eye with a drill (yeuch!).
• The Borg drilling into Data’s head.
• Worf hacking a Borg to pieces (they did cut out the bloody neck part).
• And probably worse of all: the flesh being eviscerated from the Borg Queen’s face.

So it’s OK to show scenes of violence before the watershed, but it’s not OK to swear.

This is very worrying, because it’s exactly the same slippery slope that American TV went down a few years ago, so that now they can show the most extreme violence and it’s OK, but throw in a naughty word (or a nipple shot) and suddenly everyone’s up in arms!

For the record, Star Trek: First Contact has a 12 certificate, the highest any Star Trek movie currently has.