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Enjoy your ninety days of porn and violence

By Mark Littlewood
August 26th, 2009 at 12:42 pm | 14 Comments | Posted in Culture

driller-killerThe legislative screw-up surrounding the Video Recordings Act (they forgot to send the European Commission a copy), opens a narrow window (about three months before the government “sorts everything out”) of cinematic freedom.  We should be able to measure whether there is an enormous upswing in violence, rape and murder in that time. Or whether there isn’t.

As Julian Petley points out in the Guardian, the overwhelming bulk of the censorship work in Britain is to prevent adults seeing things. In 2007, the BBFC made cuts to 25% of the films in the 18 and R18 categories.

Fans of Quentin Tarantino’s sublime Reservoir Dogs, might recall that it took two years for a video release to be sanctioned (the fact that Tarantino himself was delighted, because it allowed repeat viewings at cinemas, is hardly the point!)

This enormous Whitehall cock-up provides an opportunity to properly liberalise the censorship regime that exists in this country. But don’t expect our politicians to seize it. Far better to engage in whipping up some moral panic and to drone on relentlessly about child protection.

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