by SARAH ROWLAND

For most TV shows, the Standards & Practices Department is the enemy of creative control. This is not the case for FOX's hugely successful on-again, off-again hit Family Guy. In fact, with lines like, "Is she the one we taped taking a dump?" making it to air, head writer Steve Callaghan welcomes a little censorious intervention now and then.

"Once in a while, a joke is funny when we're in the writer's room and then once you see it on television and realize that many, many other people are watching it too, it makes you cringe a bit. So in our case, it's good to have someone that will, from time to time, say, ‘You can't do that.'"

You can almost detect a little nostalgia in Callaghan's voice when he talks about those heady days of stricter language regulations during the first season in 1999.

"They'd come to our table readings and send a fax afterward, outlining everything that had to go," he says. "At the end of the message, they'd summarize, ‘Throughout please eliminate two asses, one bitch and a crap.' So our job then was to go through the script and be like, ‘Okay we've got three instances of "crap." Which ones are essential? And which ones can we lose?' So only the very best fart jokes made it in."

With no one to put a cap on their toilet humour while making the first Family Guy made-for-DVD movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, you might expect the 83-minute film within a film to be one big shit storm of potty gags. You'd be wrong. Other than the odd "fuck," the hilarious time travel adventure - which Callaghan and co-writer/producer/actor Mike Henry will present at this year's Just for Laughs Comedia - doesn't raise the bar of vulgarity. And according to Callaghan, he's to blame.

"I guess everybody has their personality and their role on the show and I'm kind of known as the guy who's always trying to clean it. Not that I'm not in favour of a crude joke or a dirty joke but only if it's a really clever funny one. So I'm sort of the content police."

If he's the clean-up guy, then what does that make Henry, the man who came up with "Is she the one we taped taking a dump?"

"He's the opposite," says Callaghan about Henry. "He's the guy that's always pitching the jokes that I'm trying to get out. But the other thing that Mike brings to the show is a huge breadth of voices. Very often they start out as voices he does in the writer's room to amuse us. And if they crack us up enough times, we go, ‘We gotta put that character in the show.' The classic example of that is Cleveland [black nerd] but the more recent example is Herbert [kitty diddler]."

Many may know the frail-voiced Herbert as the dirty old man who has a crush on Chris [dumb-as-a-post teenage son]. But according to Henry, his beloved character didn't start out as a full-on perv: "He was just supposed to be a whimsical old man from Richmond, Virginia - the kind of guy that would be in a seersucker suit...but then I pitch one measly pedophile joke in the room and everyone jumps on it."

MIKE HENRY, STEVE CALLAGHAN AND CO-PRODUCER CHRIS SHERIDAN WILL PRESENT STEWIE GRIFFIN: THE UNTOLD STORY AT THE METROPOLIS SATURDAY, JULY 23, 8 P.M. FOR MORE INFO, CALL (514) 845-2322

>> Movie Listings