The Forbidden Weekend – The BBC’s Censorship Season

Just why the BBC decided to explore censorship – film censorship specifically – over an entire weekend is unclear. Channel 4 had done a similar, if rather more expansive season in 1991, one that ended with the channel being investigated under the Obscene Publications Act. While this was probably a badge of honour for Channel 4 – which at the time was still a genuinely edgy broadcaster – you might have expected it to be a point of concern for the BBC. However, the documentaries and films broadcast didn’t push the boundaries in the same way that Channel 4 had – with one exception – and were generally no more outrageous than shows like Eurotrash, which was showing on Channel 4 that same week. The failure of Met’s obscenity evangelist Michael Hames to secure prosecutions against Channel 4 – and his retirement in 1994 – brought an end to the efforts to secure convictions against broadcasters and perhaps signalled the beginning of the slow period of liberation that ended with the effective legalisation of hardcore porn in 2000.

The BBC Forbidden Weekend was a mix of the lightweight, the serious and the decidedly odd, with once-controversial movies – introduced by Alex Cox in the style of his much-missed Moviedrome series – mixed with documentaries about censorship. It was all heralded with an edition of the Radio Times that went for the moral panic approach, at least on the front cover – like modern-day clickbait headlines, the cover image of two children with the screaming headline “Do You Know What Your Kids Are Watching?” seemed to suggest dangers that the rest of the magazine failed to uncover. In fact, much of the writing in a series of pieces grouped under the headline “The Censorship Debate” was unexpectedly sensible, with Jack Sanger – Professor of Applied Research in Education at City College, Norwich – pointing out that most kids can easily distinguish between fact and fiction, are not harmed by violent horror films or video games and will be much more upset by footage and news reports from war zones or of dreadful atrocities. He also suggests talking to kids about why certain things might be unsuitable for them, rather than issuing a blanket ban.

Even liberal columnist Polly Toynbee – who you might expect to be wringing her hands about underage exposure to violent videos (and notably, it’s all violence under discussion – sex barely gets a mention) admits that the terror induced by the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street in her ten-year-old son is no worse than the delicious fear of the rollercoaster. Notably, one of the more intriguing programmes in the Forbidden Weekend was Children of the Video, where kids discuss the pros and cons of watching the sort of horror films that they shouldn’t have access to. While it feeds into moral hand-wringing about kids having too-easy access to adult material to a degree, it also allows the kids to explain the joy in the illicit – the pleasures of scaring yourself silly and the sense of testing yourself. Are the kids in this video damaged and traumatised? They seem not to be. Of course, they will be middle-aged adults now, many with kids of their own, and I wonder if they look back to their childhood experiences when being urged to fret about online harms?

One man who definitely believed in the dangers of violent video – and not just for children – was James Ferman, the BBFC head who back then seemed to be in the job for life. Little did we or he know that he was on borrowed time. Ferman was a man who oozed self-belief, with a soft voice and a confident smile making him seem like someone who knew exactly what he was talking about to many of the people that saw him on TV or read interviews with him in the press. Interviews like the one that appeared in this edition of the Radio Times, where he can blithely say “I believe adults have the right to watch adult films and I would hate to live in a society in which that were not possible.” Now, admittedly, Ferman was behind the R18 liberalisation in the late 1990s, though it was not the autonomous decision that many claim – he was encouraged to do so by a Conservative government that wanted to bring the illegal porn trade under control by making the legal industry more attractive to customers. The fact is that Ferman loved nothing more than to cut and tinker with films made for adults and had a list of forbidden images that was entirely his own. Adults might have been able to watch adult films – but those films were often tinkered with by Ferman before they were allowed to.

Ferman was, perhaps, the last openly elitist censor. In his Radio Times interview, he is happy to talk about ‘problematic’ films like Straw Dogs and The Exorcist remaining banned on video. “We’re loathe to pass that film on video uncut”, he says of Straw Dogs, “and yet it’s a good enough film, so we’d be loathe to cut it as well.” The implication is clear: if films are – in Ferman’s opinion – not ‘good’ or ‘important’, then they can be cut to shreds. By any definition, this is the censor acting as a cultural arbiter, deciding which films have value and which don’t and so operating a two-tier system of censorship. Perhaps we should be grateful that he was so upfront about it – our current censors are less honest about their double standards.

Ferman was central to the main documentary of the Forbidden Weekend, a two-part look at the BBFC called Empire of the Censors, which was a pretty thorough look at the history of British film censorship that ends with the naive conclusion that the BBFC might soon be a thing of the past. If only. The second half of this was followed by the most entertaining part of the weekend, a documentary adaptation of David McGillivray‘s book Doing Rude Things (McGillivray is not mentioned anywhere in the write-up of the show in the Radio Times, a magazine that he now works for). The history of British sex films might not seem to be about censorship, but of course, it is – these films were the way they were because of censorship. The documentary is a humorous study, narrated by Angus Deayton, but it nevertheless works as a thorough history of a disreputable genre.

Scattered throughout the weekend and continuing through the week were brief – so brief as to not have a proper time schedule, instead just listed as ‘following’ the previous programme – interludes called Talking X’s in which a collection of unlikely celebrities discussed controversial/X-rated films that they (presumably) liked. It’s an odd bunch – Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis on Emmanuelle, Lily Savage on The Exorcist (take that, Mark Kermode), Phil Daniels on Witchfinder General, Dora Bryan on Women of Twilight (which she at least appeared in), Jarvis Cocker on La Bête, Saskia Reeves on Don’t Look Now, Helen Chadwick on Zorba the Greek, John Peel on House of Wax, Molly Parkin on A Streetcar Named Desire, George Melly on King Kong and Alexander Walker on Frankenstein. Amusingly, Mary Whitehouse pops up to explain why she has never seen an X-rated film, a self-censorship that she wanted to impose on everyone else without ever knowing what she was talking about. I don’t remember these shorts at all, even though I must’ve seen the bulk of them. Perhaps that says something about their worth.

Another show that went beyond the weekend was a special Wednesday night edition of the chin-stroking arts programme The Late Show, in which Mark Lawson and guests debated the “issues raised” during the Forbidden Weekend and censorship in general. Again, I have no memory of this, though I must have watched it – and the guests are not listed in the Radio Times. I do have a VHS tape of the weekend’s documentaries and if it is there, I’ll update this article with a video once it is digitised.

As for the films: the centrepiece and headline-grabber was Ken Russell‘s The Devils, a film still so controversial that the Radio Times ran both a piece by Barry Norman explaining why it should be shown and comments from Ferman defending it. There was still outrage, especially as it was the ‘uncut’ (British theatrical) version rather than the US edit that was on VHS. The BBC at least restrained from scheduling it on Sunday. That evening saw the first TV screening of The Night Porter, which also raised hackles though it was a bit too arty to cause a big fuss. Similarly, if any tabloid hacks had heard of Bad Taste, that too might have caused controversy; as it was, the film went almost unnoticed with a post-midnight broadcast and the ‘making of’ documentary Good Taste following it. Had the BBC wanted to be really daring, they would’ve scheduled The Evil Dead.

The other films were all censorship hot potatoes in their day but by 1995 would not have raised eyebrows if broadcast outside this season, which many already had been: the 1932 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Beat Girl, Performance and Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence certainly gave a worthwhile random sampling of once-controversial movies, but were fairly tame stuff by 1995. This is the problem that broadcasters faced with seasons like this: there were limits to what could be shown, and those limits were set by (at the time) the Broadcasting Standards Commission (and later, OFCOM). There was no legal reason why TV broadcasters couldn’t show Straw Dogs or The Exorcist – or, for that matter, films banned outright by the BBFC. Broadcasting was not covered by the Video Recordings Act. In practice though, the regulators all had a cosy relationship with each other and made sure that the BBFC was not embarrassed by TV companies. The unspoken rule was that films could only be shown in BBFC-approved versions until they were no longer controversial – if a film was likely to be passed uncut by the censors now, it could be shown. But when Sky Movies scheduled The Trip several years later, the film had to be pulled because the BBFC had banned the film as recently as 1988. While some heavily cut or banned films were shown on TV uncut – usually by accident and by obscure cable channels like HVC – the opportunity for TV companies to test the limits didn’t exist. Most of the films in the Forbidden Weekend had never been forbidden at all. At worst, they’d been cut 30-odd years ago but had long been uncensored.

Nevertheless, the Forbidden Weekend was a refreshing look at censorship as it was in 1995. It’s hard to imagine a season like this now. Channel 4 did another Banned season in 2004/2005, but it consisted of talking head documentaries with C-list celebrities banging on about things that they knew nothing about. And times have certainly changed since then. Censorship is all the rage these days, be it to protect children and adults alike from sexual content or to remove sexist, racist, homophobic or otherwise offensive content from old TV shows, regardless of context or contextualization. 1995 was in the middle of a time of change when sexual freedoms were expanding and censorship certainties were being questioned, with both sides of the culture war making a final stand. With the legalisation of porn, the spread of kink culture and sex positivity and the demise of James Ferman as the overseer of what was good for us, things seemed to finally be moving in the right direction. We probably underestimated the determination and fanaticism of the moralisers – and didn’t even imagine the new generation of offence-takers and neo-puritans. Shame on us for complacency.

DAVID FLINT

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