British Board of Film Classification


The British Board of Film Classification is a non-governmental organisation founded by the British film industry in 1912 and responsible for the national classification and censorship of films exhibited at cinemas and video works released on physical media within the United Kingdom. It has a statutory requirement to classify all video works released on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and, to a lesser extent, some video games under the Video Recordings Act 1984. The BBFC was also the designated regulator for the UK age-verification scheme, which was abandoned before being implemented.

History and overview

The BBFC was established in 1912 as the British Board of Film Censors, under the aegis of the Incorporated Association of Kinematograph Manufacturers, by film trade associations who preferred to manage their own censorship than to have national or local government do it for them. The immediate impetus for the board's formation stemmed from the furore surrounding the release in the UK in October 1912 of the film From the Manger to the Cross, about the life of Jesus. The film, shown at the Queen's Hall, London, gained considerable publicity from a great outcry in the Daily Mail, which demanded: "Is nothing sacred to the film maker?", and waxed indignant about the profits for its American film producers. Although the clergy were invited to see it and found little to be affronted by, the controversy resulted in the voluntary creation of the BBFC, which began operating on 1 January 1913.
The Cinematograph Act 1909 required cinemas to have licences from local authorities. The Act was introduced for reasons of public safety after nitrate film fires in unsuitable venues but the following year a court ruling determined that the criteria for granting or refusing a licence did not have to be restricted to issues of health and safety. Given that the law now allowed councils to grant or refuse licences to cinemas according to the content of the films they showed, the 1909 Act, therefore, enabled the introduction of censorship.
The film industry, fearing the economic consequences of a largely unregulated censorship infrastructure, therefore formed the BBFC to take the process 'in house' and establish its own system of self-regulation. By paying a fee of £2 for every reel of film viewed, and by appointing a panel of viewers under a censor, none of whom had any film trade interests, the growing cinema industry neatly created a censorship body which was both self-supporting and strictly impartial, and therefore was not swayed by any sectional interests inside the film trade or outside it. The board's offices were originally at 133–135 Oxford Street, London; the building is located at the junction of Wardour Street, a centre of the British film industry for many years.
Unlike the American Production Code Administration, which had a written list of violations in their Motion Picture Production Code, the BBFC did not have a written code and were vague in their translation to producers on what constituted a violation. However, some clarity would come in 1916 when the then president of the BBFC, T. P. O'Connor, listed forty-three infractions, from the BBFC 1913–1915 annual reports, during the National Council of Public Morals: Cinema Commission of Inquiry, indicating where a cut in a film may be required. These included:
  1. Indecorous, ambiguous and irreverent titles and subtitles
  2. Cruelty to animals
  3. The irreverent treatment of sacred subjects
  4. Drunken scenes carried to excess
  5. Vulgar accessories in the staging
  6. The modus operandi of criminals
  7. Cruelty to young infants and excessive cruelty and torture to adults, especially women
  8. Unnecessary exhibition of under-clothing
  9. The exhibition of profuse bleeding
  10. Nude figures
  11. Offensive vulgarity, and impropriety in conduct and dress
  12. Indecorous dancing
  13. Excessively passionate love scenes
  14. Bathing scenes passing the limits of propriety
  15. References to controversial politics
  16. Relations of capital and labour
  17. Scenes tending to disparage public characters and institutions
  18. Realistic horrors of warfare
  19. Scenes and incidents calculated to afford information to the enemy
  20. Incidents having a tendency to disparage our Allies
  21. Scenes holding up the King's uniform to contempt or ridicule
  22. Subjects dealing with India, in which British Officers are seen in an odious light, and otherwise attempting to suggest the disloyalty of British Officers, Native States or bringing into disrepute British prestige in the Empire
  23. The exploitation of tragic incidents of the war
  24. Gruesome murders and strangulation scenes
  25. Executions
  26. The effects of vitriol throwing
  27. The drug habit, e.g., opium, morphia, cocaine, etc.
  28. Subjects dealing with White Slave traffic
  29. Subjects dealing with premeditated seduction of girls
  30. "First night" scenes
  31. Scenes suggestive of immorality
  32. Indelicate sexual situations
  33. Situations accentuating delicate marital relations
  34. Men and women in bed together
  35. Illicit relationships
  36. Prostitution and procuration
  37. Incidents indicating the actual perpetration of criminal assaults on women
  38. Scenes depicting the effect of venereal disease, inherited or acquired
  39. Incidents suggestive of incestuous relations
  40. Themes and references relative to 'race suicide'
  41. Confinements
  42. Scenes laid in disorderly houses
  43. Materialisation of the conventional figure of Christ.
In 1926, the BBFC annual report outlined grounds on seven broad categories that justified censorship, including issues related to religious, political, military, social, questions of sex, crime and cruelty. Some decisions from the early years are now subjected to derision. In 1928, the board's examiners report famously claimed that Germaine Dulac's surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman was "almost meaningless", but: "If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable."
Informal links, to varying degrees of closeness, have been maintained between the BBFC and the Government throughout the Board's existence. In the period before the Second World War, an extensive but unofficial system of political censorship was implemented by the BBFC for the Home Office. As the cinema became a socially powerful mass-medium, governments feared the effect of its use by others for propaganda and as happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany discouraged any expression of controversial political views in British films. This trend reached its climax during the 1930s. Following protests from the German Embassy after the release of a film depicting the execution of Edith Cavell, intense political pressure was brought to bear on the BBFC by the Home Office. A system of script vetting was introduced, whereby British studios were invited to submit screenplays to the BBFC before shooting started. Imported Hollywood films were not treated as strictly as British films, as the BBFC believed that audiences would recognise American cinema as representing a foreign culture and therefore would not apply any political messages therein to their own lives. So while the Warners gangster films and other 1930s Hollywood films that dealt explicitly with crime and the effects of the Great Depression were released in the UK largely uncut, these subjects were strictly off-limits for British film-makers.
During the Second World War, the BBFC's political censorship function effectively passed to the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, and the BBFC never regained this to the same extent as before the war. The increasing climate of post-war liberalism ensured that from the 1950s onwards, controversies involving the BBFC centred more on depictions of sex and violence than on political expression. There were some notable exceptions: Yield to the Night, which opposed capital punishment; Room at the Top, which dealt with class divisions; Victim, which implicitly argued for the legalisation of homosexuality, all involved the BBFC in controversy.
In autumn 1972, Lord Longford and Raymond Blackburn decided to pursue a matter of pornography classification for the film Language of Love at the Court of Appeal before Lord Denning, MR; they failed to obtain a writ of mandamus against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who had refused to intrude upon the BBFC's remit.

Change of name and scope

In 1984, the board changed its name to The British Board of Film Classification to "reflect the fact that classification plays a far larger part in the board's work than censorship". The board's holding company, the Incorporated Association of Kinematograph Manufacturers, aligned its name with the board the following year. At that time it was given responsibility for classifying videos for hire or purchase to view in the home as well as films shown in cinemas. Home video and cinema versions of a film usually receive the same certificate, although occasionally a film may receive a more restrictive certificate for the home video market, as it is easier for children to watch a home video than to be admitted into a cinema.
In December 1986, the first computer game to be certified by the BBFC was an illustrated text adventure called Dracula, based on the Bram Stoker novel, published by CRL; the game received a 15 certificate. The first computer game to receive an 18 certificate, on 11 December 1987, was another illustrated text adventure called Jack the Ripper, also by CRL, which dealt with the infamous real life murders in Victorian London. The horror in both games came through largely in their detailed prose. Had the game publishers reprinted the games' text in book form, it would not have carried a certificate, as the BBFC has no oversight over print media. Both games had numerous certificate stickers all over their covers to emphasise to parents and retailers that they were not intended for children, as computer games carrying BBFC certificates were previously unheard of.
The first video game to be refused classification by the BBFC was Carmageddon in 1997, but a modified version of the game was later awarded an 18 certificate. In June 2007, Manhunt 2 was refused classification for both its PlayStation 2 and Wii versions, meaning that the game was illegal to sell or supply in the United Kingdom. A modified version was made that was accepted by the ESRB but was still refused classification from the BBFC. The second decision was later overturned by the Video Appeals Committee ; the BBFC then asked the High Court for a judicial review of the VAC decision. The High Court ruled that the VAC had made errors in law and instructed it to reconsider its decision; the VAC subsequently ruled that the modified version of the game should receive an 18 certificate, which the BBFC accepted.
On 16 June 2009, the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport decided in favour of the PEGI system to be the sole classification system for videogames and software in the UK. This decision would also, unlike beforehand, allow PEGI ratings to be legally enforced much like the BBFC ratings. Initially expected to take effect from 1 April 2011, the legislation was put into effect on 30 July 2012.
Netflix and the BBFC announced an age classification partnership on 13 March 2019 where the former will classify their content in the United Kingdom with BBFC ratings. The partnership came at the time when digital media is on the rise worldwide and when parents are concerned about children seeing inappropriate content on video on demand or online gaming platforms. The implementation of BBFC ratings into Netflix UK content took effect at the end of October 2019.