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The British film organisation has guarded public morals since 1912 – but a new review into pornography could revolutionise the way they work
“You know, the British Board of Film Classification has altered almost beyond recognition,” the organisation’s communications manager trills, as she leads me down into the belly of their London headquarters. “That old image of middle-aged men watching dodgy films in Soho basements couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“Let’s see what’s going on in here,” she enthuses, heaving open the soundproofed door to their underground screening room. Inside, a lone compliance officer – who looks to be male and 50-ish in the gloom – is watching a blonde in blood-spattered lingerie unload a series of shotgun blasts into a gangster’s chest.
“Aha,” the comms manager says, after a pause. “Shall we go upstairs and meet the youth panel?”
Welcome to the BBFC – the regulator which classifies and in some cases censors the films and ‘video works’ (that is, home entertainment discs such as DVDs and Blu-rays) intended for UK cinemas and shelves. It’s their multicoloured advisory logos – U, PG, 12A and so on – that appear on posters and slipcases.
And its team of eight full-time compliance officers, each of whom views and certifies five and a half hours of audiovisual content per day, will be watching questionable material for work for as long as we want to watch it for fun.
This venerable body, founded in 1912, has also had to respond to a number of dramatic recent changes in how the British public accesses and thinks about filmed entertainment. And under its current president Natasha Kaplinsky, a tectonic shift in its remit may be about to take place.
The BBFC was set up by the film industry itself, in an attempt to forestall the growing threat of state censorship. (Indeed, until the mid-1980s, the C stood for censors.) At first it was concerned with cinema exhibition only – largely because there was no other type. And the leather-bound ledgers in its Soho Square offices still tell of those early works deemed unfit for public consumption, with offences ranging from the “unnecessary exhibition of undergarments” to “speaking ill of the King”, recorded in a spidery hand.
But with the 1984 Video Recordings Act, the BBFC found itself tasked with the regulation of video cassette tapes – which for a period in the 1970s and early 80s hadn’t been policed at all, with the exception of the odd prosecution on obscenity grounds. (The so-called “video nasty list”, drawn up by the Director of Public Prosecutions a few years beforehand, was a stopgap measure whose greatest success had been directing cinephiles and other deviants towards the grisliest vids.)
To many, the job seemed impossible. But with political will and legislative support, the board was able to tame a format previously seen by the public as an ungovernable no-man’s land.
You don’t have to have spent much time in a basement screening room in Soho to work out the 2020s equivalent. The BBFC also oversees pornography, which is typically passed at an R18 certificate, rarely seen outside the fluttering PVC curtains of sex shop doors. (Over tea and biscuits, its chief executive David Austin breezily describes a typical day’s viewing as “an episode of Peppa Pig, some hardcore porn, and then hours of DVD extras about a film you haven’t seen”.)
But its processes only apply to material screened in specialist cinemas or sold on physical discs: in other words, almost none of it. And the online adult realm – much of which would run afoul of the BBFC’s R18 restrictions, for depicting (even simulated) nonconsensual activity, painful, dangerous or physically harmful activity such as choking, or fostering an interest in sexual abuse – is largely a free-for-all.
Providing clips don’t breach obscenity, sexual offence and child protection laws, websites are free to show it to their UK users, as long as they make a cursory effort to weed out those under the age of 18 first.
For years, the public has more or less accepted this: it’s the internet, and therefore impossible to police. But it’s very possible that the independent pornography review currently being carried out by Baroness Bertin will abruptly change this – and that the BBFC will be at the heart of the shift.
Certifying and censoring online porn “sounds impossible, but it’s much more feasible than most people realise,” explains Emma James – a compliance officer who joined the BBFC from Barnardo’s, where she served as senior policy advisor for ten years. Many of the required legal mechanisms are actually already in place thanks to the 2017 Digital Economy Act: sites that fail to comply with UK laws can be hit with substantial fines or even blocked nationwide.
These laws were introduced as part of the previous government’s move towards online age verification – a now-parked scheme in which users would have to prove their age either by uploading official ID or passing AI-driven biometrics. But they could just as easily be used against those who host the sort of material deemed harmful by the BBFC’s guidelines.
The sites’ best reason to comply is the sheer size of their British audience: recent Ofcom research suggests that around half of UK adults are regular visitors. And if Baroness Bertin’s report – expected by the end of the year – does end up recommending a clearer line between the permissibly mucky and the rest, it seems likely that a certain public body with more than a century’s experience in such practices would be brought in to draw it.
The mood inside the BBFC seems to be that the move is not only wise and inevitable, but will look like a no-brainer in retrospect. (Another compliance officer compared it to the smoking ban: in a few years, he said, “we’ll look back in amazement that it was ever otherwise.”) And considering its staff have regularly ploughed through an hour of this stuff before their morning coffee, they struck this visitor as neither squeamish nor jaded.
Officers are allowed to request a two-week “porn break” when it all gets a bit much, James explains: they can also opt out of content they find upsetting for any other reason, and counselling is available for those who need it after particularly gruelling streaks. Staff join with open eyes, though, and undergo four months of training on arrival, plus a further two before they’re sat in front of explicit work.
“Because adult films tend to arrive in batches, sometimes you look at your schedule and think ‘oh’,” says James. “But it isn’t necessarily the most dispiriting stuff we have to sit through.” What’s worse? “Well,” she says, while diplomatically declining to be more specific: “there are certain children’s cartoons.”
Whatever they’re viewing, the days of scribbling notes with one eye on a stopwatch are long gone. Today, BBFC operations are run from a digital platform called Horizon: film distributors book in jobs and upload the related video files, which compliance officers then watch and rate – either in one of the Board’s two screening rooms, or at their desks. (All cinema releases are viewed on a large screen to better gauge their impact, while studios sometimes screen more secretive or higher-profile titles in their own screening rooms, with two BBFC officers present.)
As the films play, officers “tag” each notable moment with a few clicks on their keyboard: until recently, over 900 categories were available, though the list was recently streamlined. These include the entire spectrum of swear words, a wide range of sexual and violent acts, and even perilous situations such as “fall from height”: adjectives that provide further colour or detail, such as “crunchy” or “masked”, are also sometimes appended.
At the end of the viewing, the tags and their accompanying notes are cycled through, a decision is reached, and the guidance swiftly written up. Scenes are never excised unless they’re illegal, though distributors often elect to make cuts of their own to ensure a film squeaks into the commercially optimal bracket.
Wallis Seaton, a senior compliance officer, sits me down in front of the 2018 Transformers film Bumblebee so I can try out the software myself. Her fingers flit across the keys like a maestro’s on a Steinway, but within minutes I’m four or five falls from height behind.
The sixth in an ongoing series of giant robot blockbusters might not sound like a watershed moment. But as chief executive David Austin explains, Bumblebee has turned out to be a revealing test case. Back in 2018 it was classified at PG – a decision which attracted only four complaints. (By contrast, the PG that went to Peter Rabbit, released the same year, drew 50 – overwhelmingly because of the scene in which Peter weaponises Mr McGregor’s blackberry allergy, pelting him with the fruit and forcing him to self-medicate with an epipen.)
During a recent series of focus groups, however, attendees told the Board they’d got Bumblebee wrong. Just six years later, the film “felt like” a 12A – the same bracket into which The Dark Knight just squeaked in 2008. And controversially so. That call drew 364 public complaints from viewers who thought Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel should have been a 15, or even an 18 – making it the BBFC’s most contentious decision by far in recent times.
Not that they always erred on the liberal side. In 1975, they refused to certify The Texas Chain Saw Massacre full stop, and was only passed at 18 in 1999. David Cronenberg’s Crash, about a couple who become sexually aroused by automotive carnage, did secure an 18 in 1996 – but only after a six-month consultation in which the BBFC sought legal and psychological advice. (Westminster Council disagreed, and the film was banned there, forcing locals to travel all the way to neighbouring Camden to see what the fuss was about.)
Then there was 2014’s Paddingtongate, in which the cuddly Peruvian’s first adventure secured a PG for, among other things, “mild sex references”: a double entendre during the scene in which Hugh Bonneville’s Mr Brown dresses up as a woman. After 24 hours of media uproar, the BBFC reworded the guidance to “innuendo”, and all was right with the world.
Because since 1999 the BBFC has based its guidelines on regular public consultations, such feedback matters. Last year, a research project involving 12,000 UK residents revealed that in matters of sex and violence, if not bad language, British audiences were becoming more cautious: even the youth panel mentioned above, a group of 20 film-loving 15-21-year-olds the BBFC uses as a regular sounding board, aren’t champing for less regulation as they might have been a generation ago.
“We find in our work with teenagers that they are now quite conservative, with many especially keen to protect their younger siblings,” Austin says. Perhaps that’s a consequence of having grown up with an unfettered internet.
While public tastes change with time, they are also highly culturally specific. A few weeks ago, the BBFC hosted an international get-together for regulatory bodies, and Austin still finds himself marvelling at his overseas counterparts’ methods.
The most notable outliers, he says without a millisecond’s hesitation, are “the French. Rather than doing public research like us, they bring in organisations that represent different parts of French society, everyone sits around and talks about the film’s philosophical intentions, then they retire for a very nice meal and rate it tous publics.” (Some notable titles to have been passed at tous publics – the French equivalent of a U – include Mulholland Drive, Kick-Ass, Eyes Wide Shut and Borat.)
The next frontier in classification – once the small matter of internet porn has been addressed – is AI. Austin raves about a new prototype system which can convert the data from a single set of viewing notes into reliable worldwide ratings, and even “pre-tag” bad language and other obviously contentious elements. There is one non-negotiably human part of the process, however: someone still has to actually watch the film.
“It’s about streamlining the process rather than removing the humans,” Austin says. “Ratings only mean something if they’re felt to be accurate, widely understood, and most of all trusted.”
Those Soho basements will be ringing to the sound of shotgun blasts, and worse, for a good while yet.
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