Andreas Whittam Smith leapt into the
limelight again the other day - the Bishop as Batman - by saying there should be sex shops
in every town. His argument was perfectly logical. As president of the British Board of
Film Classification, he oversees a species of video-rated 'Restricted 18' that can only be
sold in licensed sex shops. But if there is no licensed shop in an area - and there are
very few outside Soho - porn-seekers go to illegal traders who sell videos out of the
backs of cars and mix paedophile and bestial material along with the normal hardcore. So
Andreas believes local authorities should control and supervise the trade rather than
ignore it, by encouraging the establishment of sex shops.
Like so many of Andreas's arguments, this is on the one hand sensible and on the other
hand slightly mad, or at any rate unrealistic. Naturally it sent the Daily Mail into a
screaming frenzy. Stephen Glover, his old adversary from The Independent, accused him of
wanting to sweep a tide of filth through every high street, so that you couldn't pop out
for a loaf of bread without confronting window displays of mind-boggling sexual
contraptions. Other papers took up the hue and cry but Andreas, far from being
alarmed by the clamour, was delighted. There was even a cartoon in The Sun !
he beams. He is an absolute Liz Hurley when it comes to publicity.
He became president of the BBFC two years ago, and until that moment he had never been
a consumer of pornography in any form. What, really, never - not at school, not in the
Army, never ever ever? No. I'd never seen a sex video in my life. The first one I saw
- which wasn't strictly speaking a sex video - astonished me hugely. It was called
Pregnant
and Milking No 5 - it was the number five that got me! So I looked at this thing
and I discovered that there is a genre, which some men pay money to see, which is of
pregnant women very dolefully and unenergetically stripping and fondling their breasts -
that's all they do. I was very new to the job; I didn't know the rules at all. So I
thought, oh dear, we can't have this in ordinary shops - we'd better make it R18. So
that's what I did. I now know that that was a completely wrong decision - it's not like
hard porn where the camera is about one inch from the action - but it still languishes in
R18.
I must say I find it weird discussing blue films with Andreas - I keep wanting to hoot
and snigger and shout 'weyhay'! He was my boss for three years when I worked on the
Independent on Sunday, and although I knew he was not the sanctimonious prig depicted in
Private Eye, I don't think we could have discussed Pregnant and Milking
in those days - or certainly not with the suavity he brings to it now. But he says one of
the things he likes about this job is the complete absence of cant. 'If we say to the
distributors, There's not a shred of a plot here of any kind, they say,
No
there isn't. We didn't intend there to be.
Most of his job consists of classifying videos as suitable either for general release,
R18 release (to sex shops only) or no release at all, and there is a
very precise legal framework for making these decisions. Classifying cinema films is a
comparatively minor part of his work - 700 films a year as against 7,000 videos - and so
far he has shown no inclination to cut anything, as he made clear from the beginning when
he licensed Lolita uncut. He believes that cinema-goers broadly know what they're getting
and I think at l8 adults should make up their own minds. Of course I'm sure 16-and
17-year-olds are running into 18 films but I don't think 12-year-olds are; I think it's
quite well policed. And no other country comes up to 18 - most of them stop at 17. We are
the most highly censored country in the world.
Alexander Walker (the Evening Standard 's film critic) had 50 fits last year when
Andreas passed the French film Romance complete with full-frontal
erections. Allow one pioneering male sex organ to rear its head, he shrieked,
and
suddenly dozens more will come out of hiding. (Actually, Walker was too coy to
mention it, but there was ejaculation as well.) But Andreas is unconcerned - he thinks
there probably will be more onscreen erections but only when the public is ready for them.
The public is becoming less tolerant of violence on film - and you can see this in
that the Hollywood action heroes aren't getting roles any longer. But the public continues
to become more relaxed about sexual explicitness - that tide has not turned. So slightly
more explicit stuff will gradually seep through. Because guidelines reflect what we can
read as public opinion and if public opinion is slowly becoming more relaxed, then we will
too.
Apparently Jack Straw approves. According to Andreas,
I have a very good
relationship with the Home Secretary.
Not all the issues are about sex and violence. There's a genre of videos at the moment
that are offcuts of television news footage, which no one dares show on a regular news
programme - people running out of houses burning, or the police opening a door and finding
someone hanging. Andreas again is permissive. I have to say, I'm sympathetic to
showing it. I suppose it's my news instinct - I think, well that's what happens. People do
run out of fires burning. It isn't acting. It isn't a story encouraging violence, it's
real.
He has a team of 20 examiners who classify most of the films, but he watches the one or
two a week that are 'problematic'. He has just passed Pasolini's Salo
which has never been licensed in this country and refused to make cuts.
What you find
with a good film-maker - it's like with good prose - you can't cut it. Secondly, the best
film-makers, when you look carefully, suggest everything, they don't actually show it. You
think you've seen all sorts of things, but you haven't really. And censors can only deal
with what we see.
So has he been depraved and corrupted by watching all these dirty movies? Has he
started fantasising about having sex with goats? No - but I don't think you ever get
hardened to it. It's very like going to the dentist. You've got this date - 11 o'clock,
Wednesday morning. And often you know it's going to be pretty tough, and you think
"ohmigod". I always ask, "How long is it?" and if there's a lot of
time spent on the introductory stuff, I think, oh that's good, 10 minutes gone! And then
quite often of course it's nowhere near as bad as you fear. But when it is bad, I
definitely feel as if my mind has been soiled. I come out of the Board and walk towards
Tottenham Court Road tube station. And as I pass people in the street I've still got the
film going in my head, and these people are part of it somehow. The only word I can think
of is soiled.' Does he find gay films difficult? 'Yes, I think I'd have to say I find it
even harder to watch a gay film than I do a heterosexual one, but that's just me. They can
be very sado-masochistic and often run into greater problems for that reason. The
video he found hardest of all to watch was one about body piercing -
It showed
everything - it showed the bolt going through, it showed the operations. And it ended up
with men - I don't think women do it - men having hooks placed in their backs - apparently
the skin is strong enough - and then they're dangled from some sort of pulley arrangement,
hanging from these hooks on their back, and revolve. They're looking for an out-of-body
experience, so they say. And perhaps they achieve it, I don't know. Well, that was a new
one! I knew nothing about that!
Conversely, does he ever get turned on by these videos?
No, not by sex videos
because they're too up close. They are fantastically unnatural. And one mark of that is
that I can never remember individual titles. If someone says, "Do you remember
Office
Tarts ?" I don't. I remember the genre well enough, but they're all the
same. I can easily be turned on by a beautiful or romantic comedy with fairly explicit
sex, sure, but not by that. I need a bit of class to be turned on! And he utters his
strange barking laugh.
The great thing to remember about Andreas Whittam Smith is that he may look like a
bishop, he may on occasions talk like a bishop, but he is not a bishop. True, he is a
clergyman's son (as were seemingly half the staff of the Independent in his day) and he
takes his religion seriously. But his high-minded puritanism is mixed with a wacky
iconoclasm, or what Glover calls his Baader-Meinhof streak. He can do gravitas in spades,
but there is also a flighty, flouncy side, subject to strange tantrums and vanities,
delighted by gossip, thrilled when Pamella Bordes once came to the Independent office,
happy to pose for Annie Liebovitz with a golden eagle on his arm, and always eager for any
excuse to open champagne. Sebastian Faulks, who was at the Independent from the beginning,
recalls him as an inspiring editor and says that 'to me he seemed a bit like the Jack
Nicholson character in Easy Rider: a real straight who had suddenly been given his head'.
Rupert Murdoch said he had 'the charisma of a poached egg'. On the other hand, everyone
who worked on the Independent was obsessed by him and would try to read the runes of his
ever-changing complexion - was mauve a good sign? Was it better to ask for a rise when he
was mildly pink or positively white? I always thought he was an actor manque but he says,
on the contrary, he would hate to be an actor, and he actually has a recurring nightmare
in which he is made to act and 'I haven't learned my lines, we're just about to start, and
I'm going to have to go on stage and look a complete and utter clown'. That's an imposter
dream, I tell him. 'Exactly, yes.' So is he an imposter? People who believed in his bishop
image were always terribly shocked when they came across his flighty side and accused him
of being a hypocrite. But, as he says, it's not his fault if people read him wrong.
He doesn't understand how he ever got this bishop image:
I'd like to shake it off -
I don't really want to go around looking like a bishop. My greatest
desire has been to be cosmopolitan and it shattered me one day when the then editor of La
Repubblica said "Andreas, whenever I think of an Englishman I think of you". I
thought, "My God - all this time I've tried to be cosmopolitan!" And when I was
feeling very metropolitan one day I went to Harrods to get my hair cut, and as I lay back
in the chair, the barber said, "Up from the country, sir?" And I hadn't moved
out of the city for six months! So I can't achieve the self-image I want. I'd like to be
either cosmopolitan or metropolitan or both really - a man of the world, at ease
everywhere in the world. The nearest I came to it was when the Daily Mail was really cross
with me about Lolita; the leader was a big attack, which ended up by
describing me as "this urbane liberal" and I was so pleased with the urbane!
That's the only thing I can set against this wretched bishop image.
He is about to become more cosmopolitan because he and his wife have just started 'an
experiment in two-city living', which means she lives in a rented
flat in Paris during the week and he joins her at weekends. It sounds rather lonely for
him, but he says, I've got lots to do, my oldest son is often here
and we're slowly turning it into a men's club - it's like a men's club without any members
at the moment.
He is 63 but has no thought of retiring. When he left the Independent in 1994 he
decided to plan his life on the basis that he had 30 more working years ahead of him.
Some
people have a fear of death, which I don't. But I do have a very deep, powerful fear of
not working. The notion of retirement has no attraction of any kind - I can't understand
it when people my age start going on cruises. I know I shall always work whatever happens.
So that tells you something about what drives me. It's not to do with accumulating money,
it's to do with a sort of puritanical view, I think, that I always wish to contribute in
some minor way. And maybe that comes from the vicarage
