The makers of The Naughty Bits however, have rightly divined that it is also a fascinating subject, and a great on-ramp into our untold history.
Initially I wished that they had gone for an actually naughty title rather than the Hi De Hi version. Still, I guess F***ing, Cocks and Vaginamite would have you thinking of an animated kids show these days, though it does have a certain sponsor appeal.
I'm happy to report that penises did feature early on in the first installment, albeit wooden ones that had been chopped off Maori carvings due to the well documented prudishness of English settlers.
The interaction of European and Maori culture provides an apt starting point for the tales of censorship that followed and The Naughty Bits covers a lot of ground and turns up plenty of untold stories.
An entertaining cast of talking heads and a voiceover took us through the first episode with its fascinating tales of the sexy, sexist and silly depictions of humanity that raised the eyebrows of various censors over the years.
Of all the revelations, the news that the first censorship laws were brought in for a very good reason was perhaps the most shocking of all.
The proliferation of snake oil sales pitches for products designed to thwart "unnatural sexual activities", such as wet dreams, also caught the eye of our more sensible forefathers, who banned the ads from the papers and drew up the first laws, effectively putting censorship on the books.
One such device offered for sale by these quacks was a pain inducing, teeth-lined penis ring that discouraged nighttime erections and wet dreams. It also gave the producers the chance to indulge in a hilarious recreation of a man wearing such a device as he first slept and then awoke in agony.
This mix of silliness and serious history makes The Naughty Bits an incredibly easy watch. Not that they have to overdo the gags to find the humour. In a subject like this it lurks everywhere. It was there on the face of former Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, as he recalled the shock of watching a videotape of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The poor man still seems shaken to core by it to this very day.
Archive of stunned looking 1980s censors looking at some blurred out, but possibly tame, porn, also seemed comedic through today's eyes. One woman even comparing the horrors she witnessed to the Holocaust.
And I can never get enough of the late Patricia Bartlett, a former nun who's morality campaign was a bigger deal in the '70s and '80s than The Sensible Sentencing Trust or Family First are today. And much like those organs of reactionary politics, her Society For The Promotion of Community Standards was hell bent on turning back the clock to an imaginary utopia that Queen Victoria would have approved of.
Bartlett didn't like the idea of sex - gay sex even less. But she did love the media exposure, and the media recognised her as good talent. It was a match made in G-rated heaven.
But she was a woman of her time, and her time had already come and gone when she reached the peak of her media fame.
As star talking head, former Chief Censor Bill Hastings recounted: "She said that women were demeaned by showing breasts, but black breasts were fine, they were educational."
The Naughty Bits is not only rich in archival treats; it provides a solid telling of history too, and it's a history that's not over yet. In fact a recent case involving the graphic novel, The Lost Girls, a book that was effectively banned by the Auckland Library, shows us that censorship is not just an odd, pre-internet antique, but a living organism that will possibly always be with us, in some form or other.
In a related outrage, I must protest at the shocking censorship undertaken by a reporter on 3 News, who, while telling the story of a serial defecator at an Invercargill public pool, used the appalling American word "Poop" instead of the regular kiwi term "Poo".
Are we really going to stand back and take this shit? I say NO!
* What do you think about The Naughty Bits? Post your comments below.
