John Martin’s book The Seduction of the Gullible is a key book for anyone wanting to read up on the video nasties furore and aftermath - a really funny, informative, and hugely biased piece of non-fiction genius.
Another film that got into trouble at the time was The Big Red One… which says a lot about the councils, goverment, police and media in this country.
We only just avoided a repeat performance under the Labour government here. An ill-considered, reprehensibly patronising proposed bill (put together by horribly uninformed MPs)was on the verge of taking us all back to same old disasterous mistakes of the past. The defense for it largely centered around how someone who was murdered owned the first Manhunt computer game - which didn’t make any sense as a reason for censorship, but gave some half-witted MPs the chance to look really dumb. The Child’s Play 3 situation similarly came about after it was thought that one of the parents of one of the children who murdered Jamie Bulger may have rented it at some point, and how if the children may then have seen the film somehow then they may have associated the Chuckie doll with a real child, and…oh lord, it was all just such dumb, made up nonsense.
I give it about a year before the censorship brigade gets something daft through on the matter of ratings though. The government here cannot get anything right under Brown.
