Back before MTV brought music videos to the mainstream, The Kinks filmed a mini-drama for the BBC's "Top of The Pops" TV show, which normally demanded performers lip sync to their hit tunes. Instead Ray Davies and the group decided to record a bizarre clip, which today we would call a "music video." 

It was called "Dead End Street" and despite all the trouble the group went to devising the 3-minute-plus epic, the BBC absolutely refused to show it, calling it "vulgar."

"Depicting the band as pallbearers, the video features shots of caskets, widows, and overarching themes of poverty. As such, the BBC deemed the video to be too distasteful to broadcast on Top of the Pops, as was originally intended. “It showed slums and poverty and so they wouldn’t run it,” Davies later recalled. “I guess they prefer films about running around in parks, jumping over chairs.”

I've never heard this story or this song before, but it's a fascinating glimpse into a past I never realized happened at all. 

‘Dead End Street’: The pioneering Kinks concept banned by the BBC