by Mingus

Jack Straw – probably the first Home Secretary in history to be more reactionary than a judge – looks set to add extra muddle and madness to Britain's censorship laws. His knee-jerk reaction to a 22 May 2000 ruling by the High Court to allow explicit sex scenes in videos was to threaten to tighten the law again.

One of Straw’s first acts when entering office was to express horror at the Tory government’s 1996 decision to encourage the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to introduce the ‘R18’ certificate for the sale through licensed sex shops of ‘vanilla’ hard core videos. The Tory’s cunning plan was to divert the public from buying its porn videos in the local pub or at the weekly car boot sale and to waste their time and energy trying to find a licensed sex shop – about which, more later.

Now, as a General Election approaches, the Home Secretary wants to ensure that the High Court ruling on R18s does not lead to our children being corrupted by the sight of a videoed erect penis on a tv screen – in spite of a judge's ruling that the risk to kids was ‘insignificant’. Yes, Jack Straw wants to tell us how to bring up our kids... No doubt he is guided by Tony Blair in this matter. Maybe defaulting parents are to be dragged from their homes, frog-marched to the nearest Cashpoint terminal and required to pay £100 in folding stuff for each stiffy spotted by a spotty youth. (Or should that be £100 for each inch?)

How did we get into this ludicrous cock-up? There are three legal prongs which can be used to prevent Brits from watching people shag. There are:

• the Obscene Publications Act 1958 (OPA);
• the Video Recordings Act 1984 (VRA) and
• the Customs Consolidation Act 1876 (CCA).

On a 1999 edition of BBC1’s Panorama, Superintendent Martin Jauch, head of the Old Bill’s Clubs and Vice Squad admitted that he was no longer interested in prosecuting the distributors of plain vanilla porn under the OPA. The reason for this was that jurors didn’t feel ‘depraved and corrupted’ after closely inspecting the evidence for a few days and declined to convict the defendants. Fair enough; ‘depravity and corruption’ is, after all, what happens to you when you become a politician.

From the introduction of VHS and Beta formats in the late 1970s until 1984, video censorship was a very grey area – so grey that some very colourful porn found its way over the Channel by the container-load. Oddly though, it was the usual fuss over spaghetti video nasties that led to the introduction of the Video Recordings Act. This took a different approach from the OPA. The parcel wrapped in plain brown paper was passed to the British Board of Film Censorship. (Yes, I know they don’t like to be called that anymore but that is what they do – censor films and videos.)

The VRA is essentially a simple law; it is illegal to sell or rent a video that doesn’t have a certificate issued by the BBFC. And it would not issue a certificate unless the distributor withdrew the erect penises, and took out penetration, masturbation and so forth. As from 1984 the law for videos more or less matched the law for printed publications. The only real difference was that the Board decided what was likely to ‘deprave and corrupt’ rather than an unreliable mob of citizens dragged off the street and told to form a jury.

A small thrust forward was made when the BBFC gave an 18 (not R18) certificate to The Lover’s Guide and so made images of an erect penis legal for the first time British censorship history. (And, of course, the title became an instant best-seller.) The reason for this change was that the video contained much more boring blag by a ‘sex counsellor’ than any actual nobbing. It was, therefore, education rather than entertainment. So, you can rent The Lover’s Guide (and similar titles) from Blockbuster without fear of prosecution (or of landing Blockbuster in trouble). These titles have also been broadcast, complete with en suite guru, on late-night soft-core satellite channels such as Channel-X and The Adult Channel. ‘Education, education, education’ proclaimed Tony Blair during the last General Election. Could this be what he meant?

Political concern seemed to centre on the serious danger of someone actually enjoying such videos. That would make then entertainment rather than education. By all means, make notes for the end-of-term test, but no spanking the monkey, you lot!

It does seem rather unlikely that Horny Catbabe, Nympho Nurse Nancy, TV Sex, Office Tart, Carnival International Version (trailer), Wet Nurses 2 Continental Version and Miss Nude International Continental Version are in anyway educational in the sense Tony Blair understands it. But it’s now acceptable to the powers-that-be for their constituents to watch porn for the purpose of entertainment. And any lively and intelligent young viewer will probably learn a good deal more watching these productions than by listening to any number of prats mugging it up as a sex experts. (Or by sneaking out and going on the piss in the West End.)

That brings us to Customs & Excise. Customs officers are well-known as aficionados of porn. They get around the problem of the great unwashed finding the naughty porn barons innocent by not letting the cases reach court if they can possibly avoid it. Diligent Excise men George and Eric break open the crate on the dockside and peer inside.

ERIC: Take a look at this, George!

GEORGE: Phew! She’s got bazookas an army would kill for.

ERIC: Customs Consolidation Act, 1876, applies here.

GEORGE: Too right, mate. Those three are getting well consolidated.

So the goodies – I mean goods – are confiscated and the importer notified. This is where the Customs and Excise Management Act (1979) card gets played. ‘Give us two grand and we won’t take you to court,’ the offender is told. Reckoning that his brief is going to cost him at least that much, he stumps up and the porn is torched.

The way around this nonsense is very straight forward. Find a ‘job seeker’ in the pub and pay him to fly over to Amsterdam on a weekend package deal operating from a provincial airport (available from your local travel agent for about a ton). Once in Holland, fill the suitcase with a selection of videos from any of the local (legal) porn stores. Remind the runner that, when he arrives back in the UK, not to call Customs on the red Honesty Phone he will see just after immigration. In the very unlikely event that he’ll see a customs officer, have him confess ignorance of the law and write off the ‘consolidation’. If he gets through, reward him by giving him the job of duplicating the tapes. There may even be a government scheme under which the Department of Education and Employment will pay his wages for six months. Put ‘Media Trainee’ in the relevant box.

And now for the distribution of R18s. It is estimated that there are only eighty licensed sex shops in the UK, so there is unlikely to be one in your neighbourhood. The reason for this is that local authorities manipulate the relevant law -- the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1982 – in a devious way. A would-be porn entrepreneur goes to the town hall and walks into the licensing department.

ENTREPRENEUR: I’ve leased this shop and I’d like a license to operate it as a sex shop, please.

CLERK: Right-you-are, sir. Are the premises in the vicinity of a school, by any chance?

ENTREPRENEUR: No. It’s two miles from the nearest school. And a mile-and-a-half from McDonald’s.

CLERK: Hmmm… Is it on a main road?

ENTREPRENEUR: Just off, and with plenty of parking. And before you ask, there will be no window display. Oh, and I have a banker’s cheque for the £3,000 fee.

CLERK: I see.

ENTREPRENEUR: So, do I get my license?

CLERK: Er, no, sir.

ENTREPRENEUR: Why not?

CLERK: Because you are opening a sex shop.

ENTREPRENEUR: Hold on! You are refusing to give me a sex shop license because I’m opening a sex shop?

CLERK: Correct, sir. It’s council policy.

In this way, our entrepreneur learns that there are far more dildos on the town council than he is ever likely to have on his shelves. The get-out is to stock a load of irrelevant rubbish so he can claim he is not operating a specialist sex shop and, therefore, doesn’t need a license. But without a license, he can’t sell R18 classified videos. In this way we get ‘Postcode Porn’.

A leading player in the campaign to get hard core porn legalised in Britain is Clive Sullivan, brother of Sport-publisher, Birmingham City-owner David Sullivan. Clive owns most of the dingy ‘Private’ sex shops (licensed or otherwise), which explains why he is so keen to get R18 up and working. It would certainly be a breakthrough for his customers to be able to buy genuine hard core from him; his empire is based on selling censored bootlegs of legal Euro-porn products such as Private, Weekend Sex and the Color Climax range of mags in the 1980s. Any customer who dared to complain about the over-printing of the interesting bits in the shrink-wrapped rip-offs was told to fuck off: "You know hard core is illegal in Britain!" Clive Sullivan made his money from being Britain’s biggest censor. Strange times.

Porn producers have always been quick to exploit any new technology. As soon as film cameras became commercially available, they were pointed at lasses getting their tits out for the lads (and lads getting their dicks out for the lasses). The same was true of photo-litho printing, video, CD-Rom and DVD. Now comes the Internet. It is estimated (conservatively) that ten percent of all e-commerce transactions in the UK are for porn products. What’s really surprising about this statistic is that anyone should actually pay to download web-porn when so much of it is free.

But the Internet knows little about national borders and nothing about Customs law. As access bandwidth for home PCs increases (see BT Open World) it becomes even more viable to download complete feature-length videos. This capability will be impossible to censor. The legislators and the censors will keep busy spanking each others’ monkeys while the British public makes its own mind up whether it wants to look at dirty pictures.