When I took the job of "film censor" in
1975 - my tenure came to an end last month - I was warned to forget about following public
taste: any decision I took would be too lenient for some, too strict for others. Nearly a
quarter of a century later, the situation is much the same - as this weekend's Channel 4
special on censorship has shown. However, though society is still polarised, at least the
grey areas in between have shifted. Nudity is no longer an issue, and sex is far more
acceptable, in the right context. Even bad language is less contentious - people still
find it offensive, but the words objected to are arguably far stronger than 20 years ago.
Some call it freedom.
In recent years I have come under strong personal attack from various newspapers,
especially those that specialise in frivolity and family values. But my early years as
director of the British Board of Film Censors - its name was changed to the British Board
of Film Classification in 1985 - were not accompanied by press carping. In those days we
were seen as a modern, campaigning body. In the late 1970s we helped to reform obscenity
law; in the 1980s we were largely responsible for sweeping away "video nasties";
and we laughed off Monty Python's Life of Brian by passing it uncut for teenagers.
But the religious right struck in 1988 over Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of
Christ, whipping up a tabloid storm over allegations of blasphemy, even before the film
arrived in Britain. When I suggested mildly to a journalist that prominent churchmen might
do better to see the film before commenting, it drew the front-page headline: CENSOR
SAVAGES BISHOPS. I responded by inviting 28 church leaders in to see the film, including
five Anglican bishops. They all agreed it was not blasphemous at law, so the furore
receded. But not for long.
In the 1990s, a new wave of screen violence coincided with a rise in juvenile crime.
Videos became the scapegoat, and video regulators the villains - too liberal for the
tabloids and too strict for the arts crowd. The Jamie Bulger killing traumatised the
nation, and the press was quick to allege corruption of the two child murderers by video
violence. As tension grew, two more brutal crimes were attributed to videos, and it took
some months for the Home Office to research the evidence and report in Parliament that
"the police reports did not support the theory that those crimes had been influenced
by exposure either to any particular video, or to videos in general". Unfortunately,
truth is no bulwark against insidious rumours, and the allegations were stubbornly and
mischievously recycled over the next few years.
The BBFC had become a good story, the stuff of Parliamentary debate, rent-a-quote MPs
and tabloid hysteria, fuelled every year by one or two contentious titles. A climax was
reached in 1997 when examiners were doorstepped by Daily Mail photographers as they left
home to take their children to school. A gallery of mugshots was printed along with
scurrilous condemnations of each for having put the social fabric at risk by passing Crash
- in retrospect a non-event, since few bothered to see it.
I was the chief culprit. "Does nothing appal this man?" asked the Daily Mail.
Well, yes, I murmured, rape as entertainment appals me, mutilation and torture appal me,
as I've made clear year after year. I've always carried the can for Board decisions, even
though most of them were reached by consensus. Crash was a unanimous decision, as was the
decision to release The Idiots (with its nude orgy) uncut. But I was hired on the
understanding that the buck stopped with me. What this meant became clear within weeks of
my joining when both my predecessor, Stephen Murphy, and the Board's long-serving
president, Lord Harlech, stood in the dock at Bow Street accused of aiding and abetting an
indecent exhibition.
What they had done, after lengthy deliberation, was to pass a sex education film called
Language of Love. They were swiftly acquitted, but the film was referred to the Old
Bailey, and I spent much of the next year preparing its defence. Again we won, and the
following year, 1976, I led the campaign on behalf of the local authorities and the film
industry to bring films within the Obscene Publications Act, which meant that at last, in
1978, the courts would have to consider films as a whole, just like books and plays. It
also meant that artistic merit could be argued in defence and that the test of criminality
would no longer be offensiveness, but harm to the morality of a significant proportion of
the likely audience. The "deprave and corrupt" test could have been conceived to
hold the line against the exploitation of sexual violence and torture, the biggest
problems of the 1970s. It might also have been framed to provide the ideal weapon against
the video nasties of the 1980s, where it proved its effectiveness repeatedly.
I set out to establish within the BBFC a framework of full and frank debate. We
recruited examiners who could argue their case vigorously and professionally, and we
encouraged diversity to ensure a broad range of opinion, with every reasonable point of
view likely to be put by the public canvassed first within the Board. We know that taboo
themes, like those of Crash and Lolita, will engender controversy, but in a free society
there should be no such thing as a taboo theme, only taboo treatments. In the 1970s,
exploitation film makers were often irresponsible in their treatment of rape and sadism.
Today, under a stricter censorship of sexual violence, such problems are far less
frequent.
Last year the Human Rights Act wrote into British law the Freedom of Expression
provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. This, for the first time, puts the
burden of proof on the censors, not the film makers. But unlike the American Bill of
Rights, the Act recognises that freedom may need curtailing "to prevent crime or
disorder" or "to protect health or morals". This echoes the 1994 amendments
to the Video Recordings Act, which require the Board to consider "harm to potential
viewers or, through their behaviour, to society". It is a good test, and one we have
applied responsibly.
Having suffered my own share of heavy-handed censorship as a television director in the
1960s and 1970s, I took pride in transforming the BBFC from a board of censors to a board
of classification. Few cinema films are cut these days, with the numbers declining from 40
per cent in 1974 to under 4 per cent in 1998. On video, cuts are averaging about 8 per
cent of the total, reflecting the stricter standards for viewing in the home where there
is far less control of audience age.
But if I began by refusing to cut works of art, I learned very quickly that art had
little to do with violence or sexual violence or crass commercial exploitation. Violence
is still the thorniest problem: to what extent should the goal of free speech vindicate
scenes of brutality and blood-letting? Even in America, judges have begun to wonder if the
test of "clear and present danger" remains adequate to stem the drip-drip effect
of "designer violence" on inner-city teenagers with access to guns. I'll be glad
to say goodbye to the violence of contemporary films and videos.
Sex is a different matter. In the last quarter century, both the Board and the British
public have begun to accept increasingly frank depictions of sex on the screen. No sexual
image has been cut from any cinema film in the last 10 years, and explicit sex education
tapes now cause little comment on the shelves of W H Smith. But pornographic videos that
offer non-violent sex between consenting adults as an aphrodisiac are still treated as
criminally obscene by the police and Customs and Excise. The Board believes such material
should be classified for adults-only sex shops, and last summer the Video Appeals
Committee supported this view by granting a sex shop certificate to just such a video.
The extent to which this can be treated as a precedent is the subject of much
high-level debate. If this approach is disallowed, then sex entertainment will be
relegated once again to the black market jungle, where pornography is mixed with violence
and degradation in a manner which is scarcely conducive to a healthy society.
I have no wish to encounter pornography ever again once I leave the Board, but 24 years
have not convinced me that the meagre pleasures offered by voyeuristic sex are harmful to
those who seek them out, provided the sex is legal, consenting and non-violent. Society
has far more important things to worry about, and we should stop wasting public money
pursuing non-violent pornography through the courts.
