The man behind the Video Recordings Act – and the ban on ‘repetitive beat music’ – has died.
They say that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but that’s nonsense. Terrible people don’t become wonderful human beings the moment that they draw their last breath. Graham Bright, the former Conservative MP for Luton and Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire, was a man whose entire career was utterly forgettable apart from Private Members Bills that were designed to make life a lot more miserable for anyone who didn’t conform to the ill-considered views of Middle England. Current Cambridgeshire PCC Darryl Preston claimed that he was (steady yourselves here) “the ultimate public servant” and a man “passionate about keeping people safe”. Well, not the people who enjoyed horror movies, made and distributed films or listened to ‘repetitive beats’ in fields, but who cares about them?
Bright, who otherwise led a career of complete backbench insignificance, is best known as the man responsible for the Video Recordings Act, one of the most oppressive bits of legislation of the 1980s. People would have you think that this Act was brought about to curb the excesses of the most extreme Video Nasties but in truth, it imposed costly and onerous legislation on pretty much everything released on video in the UK. Like much legislation, it sailed through on the assurance that it would only affect the most appalling examples of video sex and violence that the public had until that point not had a problem with. In truth, it saw cuts being made to Disney films from the 1950s and the costs of certification made the release of old, obscure, uncommercial and harmless films effectively impossible.
Had Bright known anything – anything at all – about films in general and horror films in particular, things might have been different – but of course, he didn’t. Chances are, his only experience of any of the films he so confidently condemned was a very selective collection of context-free clips put together by Mary Whitehouse to terrify politicians. Private Members Bills in the UK are an opportunity for MPs to push bits of niche/mad legislation and act as a stalking horse for laws that the government wanted to pass but didn’t want to be directly connected to – a compliant MP could push a bill with a nod and a wink that it would be given full support in Parliament while seeming to be the idea of an otherwise obscure local politician. It was known that Margaret Thatcher and her allies were keen to impose statutory censorship on video but didn’t really have the time to push through a law; Bright’s bill was more a way of scoring brownie points with his leader than an informed attempt at legislation. To get an idea of just how clueless he was on the subject, look no further than his bizarre claim that Video Nasties somehow affected dogs.
We can all laugh at this now but remember – this was a politician who was pushing forward legislation on this subject. It becomes a lot less funny then. And just in case you wondered – despite his claim, no research to back this mad idea ever emerged.
Poor old Graham though – all his brown-nosing to Maggie got him nowhere. Once the Bill became law, he was back among the Parliamentary nobodies. But this wasn’t the last that we’d hear from Bright. In 1990, another media-created moral panic was sweeping the country in the form of Acid House Raves, unlicensed parties that took place across the country where young people – always a cause for concern with politicians – gathered to dance and take MDMA until the break of dawn. Open-air events were, no doubt, an annoyance for people living locally but in true style, Bright’s Private Members Bill again did the government’s dirty work for it with a sledgehammer approach to a subject that he knew nothing about. The Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990 outlawed unlicensed raves, confident that no local councils would be likely to issue licences. Raves were defined – with wording straight out of the 1950s – as “gatherings on land in the open air with music that includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats at a volume likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality”. Note that the law didn’t only apply to outdoor events – a rave only had to be loud and repetitive enough to potentially upset people, it didn’t matter if it did so or not.
Parliament later realised how clumsy Bright’s legislation was. The Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act was repealed in 2003, just thirteen years after taking effect. In 2009, it was discovered that the 1984 Video Recordings Act was unenforceable due to a mistake in informing the European Commission about it. A new version – in essence, the 1984 Bill – was fast-tracked back into legislation, the opportunity for overhauling an Act that was long out of date wasted in the rush to save us all from uncertified movies.
Bright rose to become a lickspittle for John Major and was rewarded by being appointed Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party in 1994 – a position that sounds fancier than it actually is – and knighted the same year, presumably as reward for a couple of decades of toadying. He lost his Luton seat in the 1997 election but once a politician, always a politician. When Police and Crime Commissioners were created in 2012 as yet another level of elected politician to add another layer of partisan interference to the running of society, Bright was selected as the Conservative candidate for the safe seat of Cambridgeshire. He immediately caused controversy by appointing a business and political colleague as his deputy – the whole failed idea of PCCs was that they would be above party politics – but of course, all the political parties immediately stood their candidates who were then voted on in much the same way as any other election and behaved accordingly. Beyond an announced crackdown on errant cyclists that seemed to go nowhere, Bright’s tenure as PCC was entirely insignificant and, like most of the other PCCs up and down the country, seemed a waste of money and little more than a nice retirement plan for failed politicians.
Graham Bright’s life in politics seems an especially worthless one. Two pieces of awful legislation where he was little more than the government’s stalking horse, making a complete fool of himself in interviews so infamous that even the respectful obituaries have felt the need to mention and a political jobsworth career that never saw him amount to anything. He stands as an example of just how breathtakingly dumb the people who draft and pass legislation are, which I suppose is an achievement of sorts. But his legacy will be as a reactionary miserablist, dedicated to clamping down on the pleasures of others because of tabloid hysteria while thinking himself smarter than the people who actually knew what they were talking about. He is not someone to celebrate.
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