Mary Whitehouse was the outspoken joint founder and president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association and also the joint founder of the National Festival of Light, she was to become one of the faces of Video Nasty phenomenon . She was an evangelical christian and art teacher, she was also a sex education teacher, bet they were fun classes! Whitehouse wanted a return to traditional christian values and was against the rapid social and political changes in the 60's. Her beliefs often saw her come into conflict with groups advocating the sexual revolution, gay rights, children's rights and feminism, she basically wanted a vanilla society!
She managed to successfully initiate a couple of private prosecutions a successful one against the Gay News on the grounds of blasphemous libel and an unsuccessful one against the director of the play The Romans in Britain Michael Bogdanov.
The National Festival of Light was a christian group that was concerned that people were enjoying themselves too much so wanted to put a stop to it, they were concerned with the amount of sex and violence in the arts, media and on TV (yep all 3 channels of it!). It was started up by Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge, Lord Longford (yep friend of child killer Myra Hindley and avocate for her release) and Peter and Janet Hill, other notable members included Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Cliff Richards!
NFOL managed to arrange some impressive demonstrations and marches, attracting 10's of thousands supporters across the country, initially support was good overall, but did eventually fade.
James Ferman started at the BBFC as a bit of a breath of fresh air overseeing extensive liberalisation of censorship standards, this would later cause him trouble as he was accused of allowing videos to pass that caused real life violence (there was of course no actual proof that they did, but when have the press let facts get in the way of a good story!). Upon release of the Video Recordings Act 1984 it all went a bit downhill from there, he became under more scrutiny and started to insist that he personally approved all new movies presented for classification. Ferman had a thing about nunchuks, they were cut from every movie that tried to include them, most famously Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 when he was unable to tell "the difference between a martial arts weapon and a sausage", and believing that children would be equally bamboozled!
BBFC was the British Board of Film Censorship until the introduction of the Video Recordings Act 1984 when it changed it's name to the British Board of Film Classification.
Film distributors can hold some of the blame for fueling the fire and poking the bear, companies like Medusa, InterVision, New World and VipCo to name just a few. To make their titles stand out from the rest they made sure that they were as graphic and lurid as possible, sometimes not really having anything to do with the actual film!
Check out The Art of Nasty and Video Nasty Mayhem, also The Original Video Nasties
Other titles worth checking out are The Seduction of the Gullible and Trash or Treasure
It's worth checking out the following documentaries available on YouTube:
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