ISTANBUL DIARY:As clips go, it looks pretty inoffensive: scenes of men dancing jigs in a dark, water-filled basement interspersed with shots of a crowded dinner table studded with bottles of wine.
But when singer Aslizen Yentur sent the promotion video for her first album to Kral TV, Turkey's top music station, she was told the alcohol would have to come out.
"I thought it was a joke," says Aslizen, a 30-year-old who's been a support vocalist for some of Turkey's best-known groups. "The album is called Cheers. The song is based on a Greek tavern song. Was I supposed to sip yoghurt drink?"
Her arguments cut no ice with Kral. When the clip was broadcast earlier this month, all that remained was the Scottish dancing, plus a couple of lingering shots of the leading lady reclining on a red divan.
Kral TV officials were unavailable to comment on their decision, which has no basis in Turkish law. But the censorship comes as RTUK, Turkey's broadcasting watchdog, works on new regulations that would make it illegal to broadcast scenes that "encourage consumption of alcohol". Leaked to the media in mid-January, news of the plans sparked outrage, and a defensive justification from the watchdog. The draft, it insisted in a January 23rd press release, is merely bringing Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership, into line with EU norms.
In this conservative, mainly Muslim country, the Bill has many supporters. Nearly half the complaints RTUK received last year were from viewers upset at what they considered alcohol's excessive visibility on TV.
Pointing out that European regulations on alcohol are limited to advertising, critics see hardening official attitudes on alcohol as a symbol of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government's worrying turn towards religious populism.
"Drink was always an issue for conservative opinion, but until now no government paid attention to it," says Mehmet Ali Birand, a prominent commentator.
"Now the AKP seems to be saying 'come on, let's give them a hand'."
Aslizen Yentur is not the only victim of the new puritanism. Last week, 20 bar owners in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir looked set for bankruptcy after the local governor gave them a month to move out to a designated district on the outskirts of the city.
A government initiative to create "red streets" for bars was thrown out by the country's highest administrative court in 2005, and Diyarbakir's chamber of commerce has taken the governor's decision to court.
But Diyarbakir is not the only place where city centre bars are finding life increasingly difficult.
Small but full of potential, Turkey's millenia-old wine-making industry is also feeling the pinch, following a 400 per cent hike in wine taxes since the AKP came to power.
Owner of a winery on the Marmara Sea, west of Istanbul, Cem Cetintas says he's had to put plans to extend his vineyards on hold. "Making wine these days is like selling snails in a Muslim neighbourhood," he adds, using a common Turkish phrase for something that flies in the face of religious and cultural norms.
An Islamic-rooted party whose leaders are all teetotal, AKP has received international plaudits for its pragmatic reformism since it first came to power in 2002.
But its clumsy, on-going efforts to end an unjust ban on head-scarved students in university have polarised this most secular of Muslim countries, leading to unprecedentedly harsh rhetoric on both sides.
Facing volleys of criticism from the secular media, prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has responded in kind. "You are the ones who print pictures of totally naked women on newspapers against this nation's moral values," he said angrily on February 13th. "Have we interfered with that?"
All this talk of moral values worries many Turks, who point to the increasing public use of religious-tinged words like caiz(permissible) and gunah(sin).
"I fear that what we have here is the beginning of a major normative change, a change against secular lifestyles, a gradual profound Islamisation of society," says Hakan Yavuz, author of a highly-regarded and broadly sympathetic book on Turkish political Islam.
Barring AKP's rapid return to its pro-EU policies of pre-2004, he thinks it's a process that could prove very difficult to stop. Such pessimism may just be premature, though, at least if Turkish history has any lessons to give.
AKP - and their appointees in nominally autonomous public bodies like RTUK - aren't the first leaders to take a dim view of drinking.
Faced with rebellions throughout Anatolia and widespread discontent, the early 17th-century Sultan Murat IV responded by closing coffee houses and taverns. Aimed at crushing potential hotbeds of unrest, the crackdown failed.
Murat IV died shortly afterwards, aged 29 - from drink.