As someone who loves to collect physical media, as well as the fact that I live in Ireland and get most of my DVDs and Blu-rays from Britain, it’s a fact that I’m going to encounter the ratings given by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification). However, I’ve come across my share of frustration with regards to the BBFC and so I thought it worth sharing these frustrations by writing an article.
Considering that you’re only likely to encounter the BBFC in any major way by living in either the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, I think I should begin by explaining who they are. As you can imagine from the name, they are the organisation that is responsible for watching and classifying all film and TV media in Britain. However, one of the more notable things about the BBFC in contrast to similar organisations in other countries is that the ratings provided by the BBFC are mandatory to be distributed. This, of course, has led to several aspects of the BBFC becoming frustrating to me.
I recently ran into an issue when I was looking for particularly intense horror films and was reminded of the existence of a 1978 movie called “I Spit On Your Grave”, a film that I’ve heard of before and, as a horror fan, have quite a bit of interest in watching. I went to Amazon and found a Blu-ray release of the film that had been released in 2020. However, upon looking at the reviews for the release, I saw that the film, even as of 2020, is missing about 1 minute and 41 seconds of footage. As you can imagine, I found this to be completely off-putting and am going to wait to see if a completely uncensored version is released in the future.
The BBFC has tried to justify this by stating that “eroticised depictions of rape and sexual violence . . . may have a harmful effect upon the attitudes and behaviour of some viewers.” However, I believe that this argument has about as much weight as the idea that violence in film and video games cause people to act more violently which is to say that it has none. Of course, the BBFC does provide a valuable role in informing the consumer of the type of content present in a particular work but it should ultimately be up to the viewers themselves to decide whether they wish to view said content. Therefore, you can imagine that I oppose this type of censorship vehemently.
However, my frustration with the BBFC does not stop there. I remember listening to a podcast from Manga UK and Jerome Mazandarani made a point that smaller film and TV distributors face much greater difficulty because of the cost of having the BBFC rate your product. It wasn’t until recently that I actually looked up this cost so I can’t say whether the cost has changed since then but, as of the writing of this article, the costs on the official BBFC website are that packaged media has a rating cost of £8 a minute. While this might not seem like much, distributors whose sales unit for each product might only number in the thousands, maybe even in the hundreds, will feel these costs quite severely. The fact that these ratings are required in order to be sold in the UK is even more insulting and I strongly feel that, given the fact that it’s mandatory, the BBFC should be fully funded via the British government which would alleviate some of the pressures that smaller distributors face.
I hope that you can understand my concern with regards to the BBFC and, hopefully, we will see them reformed eventually. Let me know your thoughts on my frustration with the BBFC, whether you agree or disagree with my concerns, your own thoughts on film classification, what you think about the costs of distributing packaged media in the UK and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!