Paddington Bear doesn’t seem like the most obvious subject to be associated with the topic of censorship. But that sweet, cuddly façade hides a disgusting, sexually explicit monster. Or at least that’s what the British Board of Film Classification thought when it gave the film a PG rating for “mild sexual references”. That may be a step far for a kid’s film about a CGI ursine whose most distinctive characteristic is liking marmalade, not corrupting young minds. But it does raise the oft forgotten role that the BBFC, and censorship, has to play in our modern cinematic experience.
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The BBFC has been around since 1912, created by the film industry so it could regulate itself rather than let the government intervene. It’s the body responsible for the small screen that pops up before a film starts, reading “Classified for Viewing”, and it decides what certification films deserve. Though a film can legally be shown without a BBFC rating, there’s no example in recent memory of that happening, and local authorities almost religiously follow what their guidance says.
So far, so ordinary. But the annals of the BBFC’s history reveal a fascinating, fractious, and often deeply controversial relationship with cinema itself. Take Ken Russell’s historical drama-horror The Devils, starring Oliver Reid as a Seventeenth Century Catholic priest who was accused of witchcraft. The film was a test case for the BBFC, as it was lobbied from all sides due to the blasphemous, sexually explicit, overtly violent, and profanity-filled nature of the production. An orgiastic dream sequence involving nuns having sex with an effigy of Christ was eventually cut, though the original edit of the film has, to this day, never been released for public consumption and the film remains unreleased on DVD in the US.
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An even better example would be the furore around the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, which caused such controversy that the kneejerk reaction was taken by the BBFC to ban the word ‘chainsaw’ from all film titles before they would even be considered for rating.
However, the BBFC’s most notorious moment came in 1984, when it gained the additional role of rating film releases on video. This led to the infamous ‘Video Nasties’ list; a catalogue of straight-to-video, foreign, or niche exploitation films that were outright banned from release. This included such family-friendly classics as Cannibal Apocalypse, Cannibal Holocaust, Gestapo’s Last Orgy, SS Experiment Camp, and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. Clearly, fascism and consumption of human flesh were big in the ‘80s. Campaigns by both The Times and The Daily Mail fuelled public concern over the level of obscenity in films; hence the BBFC demanded drastic cuts to the films, ranging from 19 seconds to over 11 minutes, in order for them to gain certification.
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Though, in hindsight, that might seem to be a moment when censorship ventured into the hysterical, the BBFC has come under fire more often for its perceived lax attitude towards certifying films. In 1996, The Daily Mail, that bastion of common sense, again campaigned the BBFC, this time on the grounds that it had released David Cronenberg’s Crash without any cuts at all. Similar uproar emerged when Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange were released with X ratings, the backlash so severe against Clockwork that Kubrick himself withdrew the film from exhibition.
Recent films have equally borne the heft of the BBFC’s axe. A Serbian Film had to have over four minutes cut from its running time to gain an 18 rating, whilst The Human Centipede 2 was initially banned by the BBFC from release, before 42 cuts were made for it to also be given an 18 rating.
It’s fascinating that a body which ultimately decides what films can be shown in cinemas, and in what edited form, is so subordinate in the public’s consciousness. Though it might not initially seem so, the BBFC has a fascinating history, one that charts not only many of the greatest films ever made, but also the national reaction towards them.
