20.08.1998

Under the censor’s knife

Two aspects of the censorship that surrounds us recently came into sharp public focus. First off the blocks was a slight lifting of the lid on video censorship in the UK, courtesy of the annual report of the British Board of Film Classification and the subsequent furore in the media that started 10 days ago.

Despite the liberal label awarded by the press, including The Independent and the Daily Mail, the BBFC report authored by outgoing director James Ferman merely advocated giving life to the near-defunct ‘R18’ sex-shop video category so that, for example, real consensual heterosexual sex acts might be depicted in pornography. Ferman, who is retiring in December after 23 years as BBFC supremo, pleaded only for the police not to seize videos containing such depictions, since they do not of themselves ‘deprave and corrupt’, which is the current vague legal test. Of course, real sex acts are already portrayed in BBFC-certificated videos under the ‘sex education’ rubric within the freely-available adult category ‘18’.

Part of the reason for Ferman’s outspokenness must be the drubbing he received a few months back at the hands of home secretary Jack Straw, who took him to task for admitting publicly that his board was allowing a little more explicit porn material than hitherto. Straw’s unbridled desire to curtail any manifestation of impropriety in the Blairite remaking of Britain, pandering to Mrs Grundyism in the process, leads him to make strange bedfellows. Of course, like much of the ‘debate’ around censorship, including video censorship, the great and the good have had the field very much left to themselves in deciding what the benighted masses may or may not enjoy. The Daily Mail, in particular, has over the last decade and a half taken upon itself the role of public guardian against the tide of ‘filth’, violence and video ‘nasties’ for which porn merchants and others it deems moral reprobates have created a market. Ferman has oft been cast as the liberal villain in the Mail’s demonography, a raving radical out to flood Britain with porn.

A shake-up at the BBFC has been on the cards for some time. When Jack Straw’s placeman, Andrew Whittam Smith, was put in to replace Elizabeth Windsor’s cousin, Lord Harewood, as president, he upgraded the post immediately, sidelining Ferman, who had previously held uncontested sway within the organisation. But everything has its price and the payment being exacted at the moment is threatening the existence of the BBFC as an institution. Deep demoralisation is setting in. Ferman’s deputy is unhappy. The BBFC’s crusty board of management has been rolled out to stem internal rebellion. Disciplinary action against staff is being mooted to stem public leaking about its arcane workings.

One worrying aspect of the new regime at the BBFC is the report that Whittam Smith has been having regular and frequent meetings with David Alton, whose restrictive amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill (as it then was) would have had the effect of forcing the dumbing down of videos so that only those hacked by cuts to ‘PG’ level would be available.

Squalid, behind-doors machinations are typical of how our rulers would have things, of course. Despite Blairite squeakings about transparency and accountability there is no way that anything but window-dressing gestures toward openness in matters of censorship are contemplated. The agenda for discussion decided for us and debated so far publicly has still not progressed beyond the manner in which censorship over what we see and hear is to be better regulated. Film which is screened theatrically for what censors see as a different demographic (ie, not so working class an audience as for video) never suffers to the same degree the indignities placed on supposedly more influential video releases, even when they are of the same works as appear on film.

However, over the last decade there have been markers in the road which we can follow to expose the bankruptcy of the censor’s patronising view. In the early 90s, Visions of ecstasy, which depicted the erotic-religious visions of a saint having sex with Christ on the cross, was banned by the BBFC on the grounds of blasphemy. More recently, Ray Brady’s serious and difficult Boy meets girl was in 1997 denied a video certificate (ie, banned) by the BBFC on the grounds of its ‘excessive’ sado-masochistic violence; an appeal under the Video Recordings Act procedure subsequently confirmed the ban. But since Whittam Smith’s appointment, reflecting the Blairites’ moralistic imperative, the boundaries are now being even more restrictively drawn. This year, soft porn distribution company Sheptonhurst had its Making whoopee banned by the BBFC, a decision reversed on appeal; but now, however, Whittam Smith is courting a judicial review, as well as calling into question the legal basis upon which he operates, by announcing that he intends illegitimately to refuse the work a certificate nonetheless. We shall see if his Blairite masters whip him in on this one.

Not to be outdone in the censorship stakes, the boys in blue in Southampton got hot under the collar last week on spotting the window of a left bookshop, October Books. The cause of their anger was a poster advertising Irvine Welsh’s newly published book, Filth, bearing the image from its front cover of a caricature pig’s head wearing a police helmet. Police raided the bookshop, confiscated posters, and were last heard to be contemplating passing the case to the Crown Prosecution Service under provisions in the Criminal Justice Act 1994 against “intentionally causing harassment, alarm, or distress through threatening, abusive or insulting words, behaviour or displays”. On conviction the offence carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison and/or a £5,000 fine.

Afterwards, October Books worker Liz Carter commented: “The police said it was the first time they had seen the poster and they found it offensive … The officers were upset, but although the book can hardly be said to present a positive depiction of the police, the image is supposed to be light-hearted … If the poster is so offensive why didn’t they seize copies of the book as well?”

When even posters advertising challenging books of well known authors can be seized by police, the state’s representatives must surely feel that they have some mighty good laws in their back pockets

Tom Ball