A while back, I wrote a piece on censorship, a subject that has always interested me. I’ve had to read it again, so as to hopefully not repeat myself in a post about video nasties, which I touched on before. I was bought a birthday gift recently, the book Video Nasties: The true story of court cases, cock ups and collateral damage by Harry Pearce. In short, I’d like to recommend it to people.
First of all, it is clear it is self-published and falls into the traps caused by not having an editor, which is a shame, because I feel if a publisher had taken a chance with this author, they could have had a solid seller to students studying forms of media for degrees etc. It is a first-hand account of a video shop owner in the height of the moral panic over the video recordings act of 1984.
It is quite painful to read in parts. The author comes across as a person trying to do right, starting a small business and trying to follow the rules as they were laid down by incompetent or disinterested parties. Disinterested is the key word as the Video Recordings act was a prime example of appeasement legislation. The media were calling foul about videos, wringing their hands and screaming ‘won’t someone think of the children?’ like Maude Flanders, or indeed, literally every group trying to get a form of media they dislike banned. The so-called ‘moral majority’ that was often referred to in the 1980s were essentially middle class prudes, often objecting to things they had not experienced for themselves, yet feared the corrupting influence of it anyway. The government rushed through a law and then essentially washed their hands of it, leaving it in the hands of clueless local authorities that had no real guidance on how to enforce it.
What the author experiences is being taken to court for supplying banned videos, despite not being given a list, despite requests, of what those videos are. The charges are changed, as the list was frequently having titles dropped and added, which to the writer was a case of widening the goalposts to either victimise or persecute the small business owners for simply trying to make a living in what was a boom industry at the time. The author states at time that writing about the experience and reliving it made him angry all over again, it is easy to see why as I was incensed by it too. It isn’t only with hindsight that I come to those conclusions either, the man was treated unfairly and unjustly by the police and the courts and the reason was purely to keep Conservative voters happy.
Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t imprisoned or anything like that, he was fined heavily. But the conviction for distributing ‘corrupting’ materials resulted in him losing his main job as a teacher. A person’s life effectively ruined over films that are freely available today, most of which happened in 1999. A shadow clouded this person’s life for many years and affected future employment too. The book comes across as an attempt to settle a score, again, it is easy to empathise.
What I found most interesting was what the author didn’t explicitly say. He has murmurings of conspiracies and paranoia, which seem largely unfounded and flimsily justified. This leads me to see more of the frame of mind that the author was in at the time, and in all likelihood will remain that way. The sad fact of the matter is what I mentioned earlier, the laws were passed and rather than the police and the courts intentionally trying to ‘bully’ the little man, it was simply incompetence. The way any form of civil service works in the UK is one where communication is either slow or non-existent, which results in police not knowing what constitutes a banned film or not on raids. People were arrested, then the videos were listed to see if any of them were on the list. What was not mentioned on said list was that many titles had been resubmitted, recut and had perfectly legal versions available for sale. The Burning is one said example, and the author was fined for supplying a legitimate version of it. The courts were not media savvy in the slightest and this shows in Mr Pearce’s trial.
Looking at it with today’s eyes, it is easy to scoff that nothing like this could happen today. With websites being able to be updated instantly, if a list of banned products that was changing was made today, a vendor could simply check daily to see and in theory, not be prosecuted for supplying products prior to their addition. Perhaps there wouldn’t be the same legal struggles for vendors, but if groups today find something objectionable, even if it has been deemed fine by other bodies, such as the BBFC, they attack distributors online with hordes of like-minded people, pressuring those businesses to stop to avoid the negative attention. The root cause remains the same – stupid people refusing to educate themselves about products they don’t like and insisting that they are damaging to children, usually with no shred of evidence to back it up. Ironically, since I am largely anti-censorship, I feel that it is those types of people that should be censored.
Video Nasties by Harry Pearce is available on Amazon for £5.49.
Tokyo Cowboy 