While the history of censorship dates back to ancient Greek and Roman times, in Britain, censorship – particularly moral regulation – is usually traced back to the puritan ideas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, since when there have been endless attempts by the state, church and moralists to regulate what the public sees and hears in the belief that this will influence social and political conduct.
One of the earliest examples of modern-day censorship dates back to the 1857 Obscene Publication Act. The Act was passed in an effort to curb the Victorian underworld trade in pornography, particularly in London. While the act was only intended to censor porn, very soon it was also used to ban some now famous early twentieth-century works of literature which moralists then deemed to be offensive (e.g. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian novel, Well of Loneliness).
Early radio is yet another example of a medium that was subject to considerable moral regulation. What is clear from many interwar broadcasts and broadcasting policy is the extent to which the BBC undertook its wider civilizing mission with a religious zeal (see Bailey 2007b). That is to say, there was a direct link between religion and morality, on the one hand, and culture and self-improvement on the other. For just as Jesus told his disciples that the farmer goes out to sow his seed in order to yield a crop, so too did broadcasting sow the word of God through regular religious broadcasts in the hope that it would prevent any further decay of Christian morality.
Another heavily regulated medium during this period was cinema and film. Moral and social reformers were concerned about the influence of the new medium, particularly on young people. Consequently, under the 1909 Cinematograph Act, all cinemas had to be licensed by local authorities. Without a licence, a cinema could not exhibit films. Local authorities also decided what films could be screened. It was in response to increasing state intervention that the industry decided to set up the voluntary and self-financing British Board of Film Censors in 1913 [British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) from 1985]. The idea was that the industry would regulate itself. In reality, although an independent body, the Board saw itself as the guardian of public morality and the protector of the status quo, and therefore worked closely with government to help maintain standards of taste and decency.
The possibility that newspapers might corrupt their readers with sensational and lurid content has caused anxiety for moralists since the earliest days of the press. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, these concerns became significantly more widespread as a commercially based popular press designed to entertain a mass audience gradually emerged. The people who were deemed to be most impressionable – the working classes, the ill-educated, the young – became regular newspaper readers, first of Sunday and, then, in the twentieth century, of daily papers. To many politicians, church leaders and traditionalists, the diet of court reports and scandal stories that the popular press served up to this audience seemed to be designed to undermine moral standards and social discipline. The volume of criticism varied over time, but Fleet Street was never able to quieten it completely and, at some points, it reached a deafening crescendo – in the mid-1920s, in the early 1950s, in the mid-1960s and in the late 1980s, for example – when there were numerous calls for the state to intervene to ensure a greater sense of responsibility among journalists.
It is with the above in mind that Adrian Bingham explores the various moralizing campaigns to regulate or reform the press, considering their achievements, analysing the assumptions of the protagonists and examining how journalists defended themselves. On the one hand, he argues that the critics of the press certainly made an impact. If popular newspapers were to protect their status as ‘family publications’, they could not afford to receive too much adverse publicity or alienate too many of their more traditional readers, and so editors made sure that their journalists did not cross certain moral boundaries. In spite of these pressures, Bingham’s contribution shows that campaigners could not persuade parliament to establish a statutory body to monitor and regulate the press. Time and time again, governments shied away from taking on Fleet Street and encroaching on the hallowed ‘freedom of the press’. The press were also able to weaken their critics by portraying them as ‘old-fashioned’, ‘prudish’ and ‘elitist’. In short, the libertarians were ultimately able to outmanoeuvre the moralists and preserve a regime of self-regulation, a legacy that continues to this day.
Su Holmes’ chapter explores similar issues with respect to questions of taste, ethics and regulation in British television in the 1950s, a subject that is often neglected in existing historical research, with the focus gravitating towards the following decade. For Holmes, this neglect is a major oversight, partly because the 1950s is possibly more interesting for the reason that – in a still new and developing medium – there appeared to be more uncertainty when it came to conceptualizing how television could (or ‘should’) be regulated. Holmes’ chapter is all the more interesting because her narrative focuses on the micro history of an individual case study, the BBC’s This is Your Life. Although the celebrity biography programme may appear to be a curious site upon which to explore issues of regulation and censorship, Holmes’ analysis makes clear that TIYL was as controversial as it was popular. Widely perceived by critics as fronting the BBC’s battle to beat commercial TV, the programme rapidly came to represent what the era of competition might mean for British television. Hence, TIYL was regarded as a deeply sensational and exploitative show that catered to questionable audience pleasures, evidenced in the repeated calls by the press to censor the programme. What emerges from Holmes’ analysis is less a paternalistic and moralistic BBC (which was aiming to ignore the populist and commercial challenge of ITV) than a relatively daring exploration of permissible television material.
Not surprisingly, much of the literature on the history of media effects and regulation tends to be in relation to film and video. Tom Dewe Mathews’ (1994) Censored is widely regarded as the best introduction to cinema censorship in Britain, is nicely illustrated and covers some 100-odd years of film history. Richards (1997b) is remarkably concise and covers the basics, as does Carter and Weaver (2003). Former Secretary of the BBFC, John Trevelyan (1973), offers a fascinating account of what it is to be a film censor, as well as summarizing some of the key developments in the history of the BBFC. For more detailed analyses of specific historical periods, see Aldgate (1995), Black (1997), Hill (1986), Jacobs (1991), Johnson (1997), Kuhn (1988), Medhurst (1996), McGillivray (1992), Pronay and Croft (1983), Richards (1981) and Slide (1998), among others; see also a special issue of the Journal of Popular British Cinema (Conrich and Petley 2000).
Of the literature that looks at more recent cinematic case studies, Barker et al. (2001) provide an interesting analysis of the controversy surrounding David Cronenberg’s Crash based on audience research. See also Barker (1984) for a passionate analysis of the debate surrounding video nasties in the 1980s, a debate that was to resurface in the immediate aftermath of the James Bulger murder case in the 1990s (cf. Barker and Petley 1997; Critcher 2003; Osgerby 2004). Readman (2005) and Falcon (1994) are invaluable teachers’ guides to film censorship and contain useful suggestions for teaching materials, including a filmography.
For a general history of laws and morals in postwar Britain, see Newburn (1992). For a history of ‘culture wars’ over the last twenty-five years between representatives of different social and moral values, see Curran et al. (2005). Alan Travis’ (2000) Bound & Gagged is one of the most recently published histories of censorship in Britain and covers a variety of case studies from the passing of the Obscene Publications Act (1857), the banning of ‘offensive’ literature (cf. Rolph 1969; Sutherland 1982; Morrison and Watkins 2006) and theatrical plays (cf. Findlater 1968; Shellard et al. 2004; Thomas et al. 2007) through to the regulation of the internet in the present day. Another useful introduction to the long and varied history of moral regulation, especially the influence of Puritanism in relation to sexual moralities, is Bocock (1997). For those interested in the history of queer sexualities, anything by Jeffrey Weeks (e.g. 1989, 2003) is essential.
For a related discussion about moral panics – historical and contemporary – surrounding the decline in social mores and falling cultural standards, see Cohen (1980), Critcher (2003), Pearson (1983) and Thompson (1998). Boyle (2005), Carter and Weaver (2003) and Trend (2007) provide excellent introductions to current thinking about media violence and its possible effects on the public in relation to a variety of different media contexts. Much recent debate and controversy has tended to focus on children and television violence: see, for example, Buckingham (1996, 2000), Gunter and Harrison (1998), Gunter and McAleer (1997), Livingstone (1998) and Singer and Singer (2001). Of course, the regulation and censorship of sexual imagery and pornography, in all its forms, remains as topical as ever: see Arthurs (2004), Bocock (1997), Bragg and Buckingham (2002), Buckingham and Bragg (2004), Dworkin (1981), Dyer (2002), Gunter (2002), McNair (1996, 2002), Shaw (1999), Watney (1987) and Williams (1999) for a full and frank discussion of the key issues and most current debates.