UK Censorship History

The first interracial kiss broadcast on British television has been uncovered by the British Film Institute.

It featured on You in Your Small Corner , a Granada Play of the Week , broadcast in June 1962.

The drama was an adaptation of a play by Jamaican-born Barry Reckord that had been performed at the Royal Court and explored issues of mixed race and class.

Marcus Prince, the BFI's TV programmer who discovered the historic kiss while researching an event, said: I was astounded ... it was so explicit really. I looked at the date and realised its significance.

The accolade of the first interracial kiss had previously been attributed to an episode of Emergency Ward 10 broadcast in 1964, between characters Joan Hooley and John White.

A kiss between Lieutenant Uhura and Captain James T Kirk in a 1968 episode of Star Trek was the first shown in the US and is also often cited as the first shown British television .

The kiss will be shown to a Race and Romance on TV panel at the BFI on 24 November.

The War Game is a 1965 UK war Sci-Fi drama by Peter Watkins.
Starring Michael Aspel, Peter Graham and Kathy Staff.

The War Game is a fictional, worst-case-scenario docu-drama about nuclear war and its aftermath in and around a typical English city. Although it won an Oscar for Best Documentary, it is fiction. It was intended as an hour-long program to air on BBC 1, but it was deemed too intense and violent to broadcast. It went to theatrical distribution as a feature film instead. Low-budget and shot on location, it strives for and achieves convincing and unflinching realism.

A Scots academic has uncovered previously secret government files which show how the BBC collaborated with Whitehall officials in the 1960s to ban a controversial film about a nuclear attack on Britain.

BBC drama documentary The War Game , which showed scenes of radiation sickness, firestorms and widespread panic following a nuclear attack on Britain, was infamously pulled from broadcast at the 11th hour in 1965. The corporation insisted it was its own decision to implement the ban as the footage was too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting .

However the move has been mired in controversy ever since, as it was known the drama had been viewed by Whitehall officials in the weeks beforehand. Now fifty years on, John Cook, professor of media at Glasgow Caledonian University, has uncovered previously secret Cabinet Office files which show how civil servants influenced the banning of the film.

Sir Norman Brook, who was chair of the BBC Board of Governors at the time had written to Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend to alert him to the film ahead of its planned broadcast. Cook said one key memo he uncovered revealed Brook and Trend subsequently had a meeting with then director of the BBC Sir Hugh Carleton Greene. He said:

In the memo Sir Hugh Carleton Greene said if it was decided by the government the film should not be shown, then the BBC would put out a press release saying they had taken the decision independently. It is pretty clear.

The War Game was not screened by the BBC until twenty years later, in July 1985. The film's director Watkins left Britain to work abroad in protest following the ban.

These findings will be discussed as part of a BBC Radio 4 programme The War Game Files, which will be broadcast on Saturday 6th June at 8pm.

A Margaret Thatcher butt plug

Margaret Thatcher considered banning sex toys using an anti-pornography law as part of a public decency morality drive in the 1980s.

Documents released by the National Archives reveal that the former prime minister was persuaded to consider a change in the law by the anti-obscenity campaigner Mary Whitehouse, whom she met on two occasions.

Leon Brittan, seemingly well versed about depravity law, and the home secretary at the time, wrote to Thatcher noting that there was a strong case to be made for banning sex toys under obscenity laws.

In September 1986 he wrote claiming that:

Some of the items in circulation are most objectionable, including some which can cause physical injury.

He felt that sex toys could fall within the scope of the deprave and corrupt test of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.

Thatcher asked Brittan to prepare a new test, which could set a new bar for what could be considered to offend good taste or public decency. But Brittan felt that taste was too imprecise a concept for the courts to be able to arbitrate on and the plan was abandoned.

Use and Abuse of Books takes the form of an exhibition displaying and discussing some of the material from book publisher Savoy's vast and often controversial archive, focussing on graphic novels and comics, including the infamous Lord Horror (1989) accredited to David Britton and co-authored by Michael Butterworth.

The novel is based on a historical personage Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer hanged in 1946 for his infamous Germany Calling broadcasts. Warping him from Haw-Haw to Horror, the novel, with its exaggerated depiction of British collusion, views the rabble-rouser DJ through a glass darkly, catapulting the narrative into exuberance, extravagance and excess.

Throughout their existence Savoy have been targeted by censors, frequently raided by the police and have been taken to court for publishing obscene material, notably in their fight-back by having the bigoted speech of a Manchester ex-chief of police reiterated by a similarly named character in one Lord Horror story, events that in April 1993 led to Britton's imprisonment. The criticisms of and objections to publications such as Lord Horror congeal around the question of whether depicting and describing horrific acts is justified in satire, with Judge Gerrard Humphries arguing in 1992 that Lord Horror:

Is a glorification of racism and violence. It contains pictures that will be repulsive to right-thinking people, and could be read---and possibly gloated over---by people who enjoy viciousness and violence

Michael Moorcock countered that the book :

Is in a tradition of lampoon, of exaggeration. Its purpose is to show up social evils, and the evils within ourselves. The book tries to identify the ways of thinking that led to the Holocaust, and could yet lead to another one

A sex manual for teenagers that was banned in 1969 has just been republished. The Little Red School Book by Soren Hansen, has hit shelves for the first time since its 1969 ban.

According to The Guardian, when the book was published first time round:

Margaret Thatcher was said to have been very worried by it, The Pope denounced it as sacrilegious, and morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse successfully campaigned to have it prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act.

The Little Red School Book gives straight-talking sex advice that's largely still relevant to teenagers today:

If anybody tells you it's harmful to masturbate, they're lying. If anybody tells you you mustn't do it too much, they're lying too, because you can't do it too much. Ask them how often you ought to do it. They'll usually shut up then.

The new version of the book contains only one change from the original, the 2014 update no longer encourages teens to stave off boredom at school by reading pornographic magazines under your desk .

Offsite Comment: Censored whilst claiming to be uncensored

14th July 2014. See  article from  strangethingsarehappening.com

A psychopathic murderer character in a play had his age raised by censors as gay sex was considered too shocking at the time, new research reveals.

Gay British playwright Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane , which first premiered in 1964, was forcibly changed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office.

Emma Parker, a professor from the University of Leicester, came across several letters when she was researching for the 50th edition of the play.

Orton wrote in his letters he wanted the main character Sloane, a psychopath, to be 17 in first edition. He was made into a 20-year-old man in the later editions, making Sloane's sexual encounters with two siblings less provoking.

In Orton's letters, he also stated the Lord Chamberlain's Office had forced him to change words like shit and bugger in the play. Orton was told the actors playing Kath and Sloane were expressly forbidden to simulate copulation.

Dr Parker's new edition of Entertaining Mr Sloane will be launched at the University of Leicester's Bookshop on Tuesday 6 May at 12 pm.

The opening of Northern Ireland's first sex shop in the early 1980s caused such a stir that officials considered reviewing 125-year-old obscenity laws.

The store opened in east Belfast in 1982, with pickets from Christian groups telling the owners of Mr Dirty Books they were unwelcome on the Castlereagh Road.

Newly released state papers reveal that privately, civil servants and officials were so shocked by its opening that they looked at updating the law on the sale of pornography, and enlisted legal advice.

...Read the full article

From an interview with the Monty Python team:

Michael Palin says that everyone brought a different perspective to the writing. John and Graham were quite angry. Eric was very witty and funny and verbal, Terry and I were a little bit more surreal and whimsical, he says. There were no rules. You could put in what you wanted to. An important factor in its success, he says, was the artistic freedom they were allowed by the BBC. The thing about Python was our determination to control our own material. We weren't easy to dictate to.

In the third series, though, Palin says, the BBC started making some fairly ridiculous censorship decisions . A battle over one particular sketch saw all six Pythons in a heated argument with the head of comedy. We fought them for the right to say 'masturbation', he says.

Did they say it? It was cut out. We recorded it. It was the man in the Summarise Proust Competition whose hobbies were strangling animals, golf and masturbating. They just cut the word, so you had: My hobbies are strangling animals, golf... short pause, huge laugh... So what was so funny about golf?

...Read the full interview