Rating movies

If, like me, you thought the British Board of Film Classification was staffed by red pen-wielding fuddy-duddies, think again. At the entrance to its office in Soho Square, I’m greeted by its youthful, engaging press officer. Wearing what I think young people call ‘killer heels’, and treating me to an anecdote about how she copes with the ‘boring’ Euro 2012 football by drinking lots of wine, she couldn’t be less like Mary Whitehouse if she tried.

She introduces me to David Austin, head of policy. He’s not even wearing a collar and tie, never mind a censuring grimace. Within 20 minutes of my meeting him he has used the c-word more times than I have in 2012 so far (in the context of discussing its use in movies, of course), and has described to me a sexual activity I’d never heard of. He sees it a lot in the hardcore porn he classifies. It’s called the ‘bukkake’. Whatever you do, DO NOT GOOGLE IT.

‘The Ferman attitude has no place in the 21st century,’ he says. He’s referring to the late James Ferman, director of the BBFC from 1975 to 1999. Ferman was, as he himself admitted in the mid-1990s, ‘the last of the old-fashioned regulators’, the last of those 20th-century moral gatekeepers who believed they had the right to tell us what we could watch.

Austin says that where the likes of Ferman tried to shape public morality, the new no-collar-and-tie BBFC seeks only to ‘reflect it’. ‘We want to reflect what the public feels, not tell it what to think.’ So the BBFC no longer writes its guidelines for classifying films ‘behind closed doors’, but rather holds focus groups to find out what Joe Public thinks is acceptable in a 12-rated movie, a 15-rated movie, and so on.