Seventy-Two Videos

Home video arrived in Britain at the start of the 1980s, and for a few years it was almost entirely unregulated. Nobody had planned that. It was a gap between two systems built for something else.

Film classification in Britain had always worked through cinemas. Local councils licensed the premises, and councils generally followed the certificates of the British Board of Film Censors, a body the industry had set up in 1912 so that it would not face hundreds of separate local decisions. Everything about the arrangement concerned public exhibition. A cassette bought or rented and played in a living room was not public exhibition, and so it fell outside the system altogether.

Distributors filled the shelves with whatever they could license cheaply, and the cheap stock included low-budget horror and exploitation films, some never submitted to the board and some the board would certainly have cut. Their covers were lurid on purpose, because they were competing for attention in a rental shop.

In 1982 the newspapers found them. The phrase video nasty took hold that year, and press campaigns, joined by Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, turned a few dozen titles into a national scandal about children, technology and the collapse of parental control.

The response came in two parts. First, the Director of Public Prosecutions drew up a list of titles considered liable to be found obscene under the Obscene Publications Act, so that police and prosecutors would know what to seize. Titles were added and removed over time: seventy-two appeared on it at one point or another, and thirty-nine were successfully prosecuted. Second, Parliament passed the Video Recordings Act 1984, a private member's bill, which required almost every video sold or rented in Britain to carry a classification from the board, which renamed itself the British Board of Film Classification the following year. Videos were to be judged with viewing at home, and the likelihood of children watching, in mind.

The evidence behind the panic is the instructive part. A survey presented to MPs in 1983 claimed that a large share of children had seen a video nasty. When researchers tested the method, children also claimed to have seen films whose titles had been invented for the purpose. Children asked whether they have seen the forbidden thing tend to say yes, and a survey that cannot return a no is not measuring anything.

The list was less coherent than it looked, too. Obscenity is decided by juries, and juries in different towns reached different verdicts on the same title, so a film could be obscene in one courtroom and acceptable in the next. The list measured local juries and police priorities as much as it measured films.

Look at what happened to the films afterwards. Most of the seventy-two have since been passed by the BBFC for release, many of them uncut. The Evil Dead, one of the most notorious, has been available uncut at 18 since 2001. The films did not become less violent. The panic went away.

What did not go away was the institution. Britain now had a legal duty to classify an entire medium before release, and later panics reached for it. After the 1993 trial for the murder of the toddler James Bulger, in which the judge suggested violent videos might be part of the explanation and newspapers blamed Child's Play 3, though police found no evidence that the boys had seen it, the Act was amended in 1994 to make the board give special weight to the risk of harm.

Then, in 2009, came the embarrassment. The government discovered that the 1984 Act had never been notified to the European Commission, as the rules on technical regulations required, which meant it had been unenforceable for twenty-five years. Prosecutions under it had to be halted, and Parliament re-enacted it, unchanged in substance, as the Video Recordings Act 2010, within a few months.

The pattern is common enough to be worth naming. A panic needs an object, and the object here was a machine that let people watch things at home, unsupervised and unseen. Horror was not new. What was new was the privacy. The law that resulted was aimed at the privacy too, and that is why it outlived both the films and the cassette: by the time the tapes had gone, the duty to classify had become simply the way things were done.