Sunday night I saw "Masterpiece Classic" - the former "Masterpiece Theatre" repackaged, with spacey host Gillian Anderson of "The X Files" purportedly to attract a hipper, younger audience - present a new adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic 1908 novel "A Room With a View."

Many viewers probably found this version, done by Andrew Davies, the same man who did the all the recent Jane Austen adaptations, inferior to the 1985 film version by Merchant-Ivory that starred Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch.

Still, some viewers probably found this 1-1/2 hour version preferable.

Either way, the movie was way better than so much of what gets on TV.

But one thing about it really annoyed me.

PBS blurred - yes, literally blurred - shots of naked male buttocks, the same way TV stations blur the faces of terrorists or whistle-blowers or under-age criminals during interviews.

Yet the shots took place during an important swimming hole scene back in England, and the men were seen from a distance. There was nothing prurient or distasteful about it, even though Forster, who was homosexual himself, often included subtle, homoerotic scenes in his novels and short stories.

But there was PBS censoring the image of the same physical nudity that it is absolutely vital to Forster's moving story about Lucy Honeychurch's sensual and sexual awakening in Italy. (See the photo above with Elaine Cassidy as Lucy and Rafe Spall as her lover and future husband George Emerson.)

After all, in the novel the heroine has her eyes opened by great and classic humanist art, by the Renaissance statues of naked men placed all around Florence, including Michelangelo's famed "David." (PBS also managed to avoid frontal shots of the sculpture, which also didn't ring true to the plot but was less objectionable to me since there was marble buttocks seen up-close and you got the point.)

Was anybody else bothered by such unnecessary and inappropriate censoring?

Do we really live today in such a Puritan society that somehow showing naked male buttocks would violate viewers' sensibilities?

What do you think?

Did PBS, either the national organization or the local and regional affiliates, make a mistake by censoring it?

Should they lose viewership and even support "from viewers like you" because of it?

Are the right-wing, so-called "family values" people so misguided about art and literature? And so powerful at intimidating PBS?

For me, the blurring ranks right up PBS' censoring soldiers' profanity in Ken Burns' "The War," his documentary about World War II. Can we be please adult and real about realism, whether it comes at us in sculpture, fiction or documentary.

If you like your history and fiction forthright and don't want it dumbed down or diluted, tell PBS to give us the real thing.

People who might be shocked can look the other way. Or stare at their shoes for a few seconds.

Or maybe they can look straight ahead and have the eyes - and minds - opened.

Kind of the same way the heroine in Forster's novel does.

In this case, I say PBS was the real ass and the real ass it was covering was its own.

What do you say?