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Over the course of its 97-year history, the British Board of Film Classification has classified 65, 770 films. Here’s our attempt to condense that vast and intriguing history into a single page. (”The gradual retreat of British prudishness”, you might call it.)
Each vertical “slice” shows one year’s worth of films, so you see, for instance, that as late as the mid-Twenties, as many as 50 per cent of films were being rejected as too immoral. Among the 43 grounds for deletion outlined in the BBFC’s early charter were: “situations accentuating delicate marital relations”; “subjects dealing with India, in which British officers are seen in an odious light”; and “the effects of vitriol throwing”, dousing one’s enemy in acid evidently having become a popular means of exacting revenge among ex-lovers.
The first “restricted” classification, X, didn’t come until 1951, and the era of the BBFC requesting cuts to films - almost all of the Sixties Bond films were cut for having too much sexual innuendo - didn’t start to ebb away until the Eighties.
The odd challenge has still flared up, though. Scandal, a 1989 account of the Profumo affair, narrowly got away with an 18 despite a shot of an erect penis in the background of an orgy scene. The member was deemed to be sufficiently obscured.
Many thanks to the BBFC and their wonderfully resourceful site. We’ve popped all the data in a spreadsheet in case you’d like to play with it.
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