Big Brother is an expensive show. According to some reports, Prima spends around $2 million on it. To be worth the money, it has to do better in television ratings in order to get more advertising. So the producers thought that if they changed the casting, the show would have sex, hence higher ratings, hence more advertising.

The selection was therefore done using different criteria, and the participants for this year's series are younger, bolder and better looking than last year's. As a result, viewers could see some of the roommates walking naked in the house, talking dirty and showering without the modesty displayed by last year's competitors, and even some sex scenes.

And that's when the problems started.

Some politicians eager to appear as icons of morality were quick to take a stand against the show, which they labeled as pornographic. Social Democrat deputy Madalin Voicu went as far as accusing the producers of turning Big Brother into a pimp. A representative for Prima was invited to Parliament to appear in front of the commission for culture and mass media only to be rebuked by senators Adrian Paunescu and George Pruteanu, both known for their questionable sense of morality.

But the biggest problems for Prima came from the National Council of the Audiovisual (NCA), the authority that monitors radio and television broadcasts in Romania. The council's president, Radu Filip, said the show promoted a hidden form of prostitution.

Things did not stop here. The NCA fined the station, first 200 million, then 500 million lei (both setting a record for a station in Romania) for showing indecent scenes at inappropriate hours. Prima representatives announced they would appeal the decision and considered suing the council.

In mid-April, things got nastier when Prima refused to obey an NCA sanction requiring the station to stop its broadcast for ten minutes. The sanction followed Prima's broadcast of a second sexual act which happened in the Big Brother household. According to the council's decision, Prima should have shut down its broadcast between 19.00 and 19.10, but instead the station announced in its evening news broadcast that it would disregard the sanction, and that it would attack the decision in court.

NCA president Ralu Filip answered that, in doing so, Prima broke the audiovisual law, as it did not give it the right to observe a council decision - even though it contested it in court.

At the time of writing, the council has not yet taken a decision on what to do next, but not obeying an NCA decision could attract a new fine, between 25 million and 250 million lei.

So, why all the fuss? After all, Big Brother is an international show and its other European versions have not started such debates, although many were more sexual than the Romanian version.

Critics of the NCA decisions have argued the sex scenes in Big Brother were not even remotely as explicit as some in movies broadcast in prime time by most major television networks. The council's representatives explained their double standards by saying that in the movies it's an act, whereas in Big Brother, it's the real thing. Does it therefore follow that soft porn films should be allowed to air during prime time, because the actors are just miming intercourse?

But in a society where the most corrupt of the politicians are talking about moral values in front of the electorate, such hypocrisy is perfectly understandable.

I am not arguing Big Brother is a good show. Honestly, I am not a fan, and the few scenes that I watched on Prima TV have not convinced me it was a show worth seeing. I found the participants uninteresting, crass and plain boring. But if you like the show, I am sure a couple of blurred sex scenes consumed under the covers would not make you take offence with it. Compared to Basic Instinct, which was shown several times in prime time over the last few years, the sex scenes in Big Brother amount to zero ñ and you cannot convince me Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone were just acting.

Actually, in spite of all the free publicity it received thanks to the scandal, Big Brother is doing badly in ratings.

Is the NCA taking itself too seriously, just like the vote-hungry politicians who prefer to accuse Big Brother of promoting pornography and prostitution instead of tackling the real problems faced by Romania? My answer would be yes.

The primary role of the NCA is to issue broadcast licences to television and radio stations, and to make sure they stick by the rules and regulations governing Romanian audiovisual media. Its eleven members are usually from cultural circles, appointed by Parliament, the government and the presidency. Increasingly in the past several years, the council has acted as a censor, taking positions mostly against indecent language or scenes in radio or television broadcasts. Its moment of glory came two years ago, when the council shut down OTV, a small TV station, for a series of talk shows in which the moderator failed to silence extremist Greater Romania Party leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor from trashing his political opponents. In the past, the council also banned several Romanian and international pop songs because it claimed they promoted the consumption of alcohol or drugs. More recently, the council advocated the correct use of Romanian language in television and radio shows.

Meanwhile, news broadcasts grow increasingly shallower and more violent, potentially shocking and offensive images are still being shown on prime time, and cop shows are full of scenes where suspects are presented as if they were proven criminals.

Maybe the NCA should take a stronger stand against such practices, thus helping increase the quality of news, rather than worrying about a few dubious sex scenes on some poorly made reality TV show. After all, the public is the best and most entitled censor, and it holds the most effective instrument for sanctioning bad television: the remote.

Alex Ulmanu lectures in media and is the founder and director of the StartMedia Foundation.