Time Shift: Dear Censor

Blood and guts, sex and blasphemy - not if the censor had anything to say, writes Arts Desk's Josh Spero...

I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.

A compact history of the British Board of Film Censorship (it became the less finger-wagging Classification in 1984), made with extensive access to its letters archive, Dear Censor showed the tensions at play within the organisation as film-makers strove to make art and money - rarely at the same time. Some chief censors, such as John Trevelyan, seemed to trust that art was being made, and his clever co-option by film-makers such as Ken Russell, who let him advise on the script of Women in Love, neutralised his authority. (In one brilliant anecdote, Trevelyan used to come into the office and ask, "Who's fucking who today?") Others were victims of their time, driven out for liberal attitudes.


Moral campaigners were outraged when the film appeared in cinemas in 1969 notes Anita Singh in today's Telegraph, it was the first time that male full-frontal nudity had been allowed on screen. Ken Russell, the director, and Larry Kramer, the producer of the DH Lawrence adaptation, wooed the chief censor, John Trevelyan, by taking him out to lunch and offering to make him part of the “creative experience”. Mr Trevelyan was shown the script at every stage and helped to shape the finished product, requesting that the homosexual overtones be “handled discreetly”. When he expressed doubt about the “clearly visible genitals” on display, Russell responded by offering to darken the shot. Mr Trevelyan agreed, and declared the film “brilliant”.

The correspondence has been made public for the first time in a retrospective of landmark decisions by the British Board of Film Classification. Alan Bates, who died in 2003, admitted that watching the scene in the editing suite was an awkward experience. “You only get to see a few moments of it in the film, just a flash, but we saw hours of it. It seemed to go on for ever, and it was tortuous,” he said. “My worst fears were about my mother’s reaction – that I really dreaded – but it never bothered her in the least.” Linda Ruth Williams, a professor of film studies at the University of Southampton, said: “I think it needs to be remembered that this is only two years after sodomy for men over 21 was made legal in Britain. This was an extraordinary climate in which film-makers were in cahoots with censors from the outset.”

In 1954, the censors were so appalled by Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One that they banned it altogether. The ban lasted until 1967, and the reasons are revealed in a letter to Columbia Pictures from the chief censor of the time, Arthur Watkins. “The Wild One would expose the board to justifiable criticism for certificating a film so potentially dangerous on social grounds,” Mr Watkins wrote. His ruling stated: “Brando is certainly an accessory to larceny, malicious damage to property, false imprisonment, assault and battery, insulting behaviour and reckless driving”.

Brando’s performance made the character of Johnny Strabler “attractive, admirable [and] imitable” and could have a “harmful influence” on young men, particularly Teddy Boys, the BBFC added. “We regret we are unable to issue a certificate for this spectacle of unbridled influence”. An executive from Columbia Pictures wrote back, describing the decision as a “terrible” one and attempting to reassure the BBFC that “what our film portrays is a matter that could not happen in England”. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The film is deemed so innocuous now that the DVD carries a PG certificate.

There is a chicken-and-egg paradox in the existence of the BBFC: what comes first, the censorship or the attitudes of the public? Or, put another way, should the BBFC try to lead public taste or reflect it? This was the dilemma which recurred throughout the programme: from the letters of complaint received, clearly certain segments of the public were not ready for the word "fuck" in Ulysses, the full-frontal male nudity (always more dangerous than female nudity) in Blow-up and Women in Love, the rape in Straw Dogs, the kicking of a tramp to death in A Clockwork Orange, most of which we got to see. But then many people have never been ready for those.

As made clear by the greater permissiveness over the decades - even if an amusing flurry of letters flew about over how dark it should be in Women in Love to stop us seeing Alan Bates's penis - the censors were not immune to public tolerance, but they seemed to wish to slow it. This is no bad thing - we do not allow the public to see anything just because they wish to - but in retrospect it looks like stuffiness. If you choose to argue that society has indeed become debased by watching sex and violence - and many do (I recall especially the coverage of "video nasties" in reference to James Bulger's killers) - then you have much on your side.

One of the most shocking things in a programme full of shockers - Michael Winner talking about making a film in a nudist camp was nauseating - was what was considered offensive. We assume it is sex and violence (although I fail to understand how sex is as corrupting as violence), but one of the chief complaints of Outraged from Tunbridge Wells was blasphemy. It wasn't that the nuns in (him again) Ken Russell's The Devils were having an orgy that was offensive so much as the licking of the statue of Christ. This is one public bugbear that continues to bedevil us (pun intended): although not a film, Jerry Springer: The Opera was vilified for having Jesus in a nappy.

Under the reign of James Ferman (1975-99), the pace of acceptance accelerated. Dear Censor ended in 1991 because letters thence are still private, but it was a tantalising moment: Natural Born Killers was to come, as were Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and plenty of other films which would have made poor John Trevelyan sputter. Although the programme did not make a judgment on what came first, it seems that for most of its history, the BBFC has been trailing the public, and that's no bad thing - let it be slower than over-eager and release onto us what we're not prepared for.