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. 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.