Glossary
Video Recordings Act 1984
The law that ended the panic by giving the campaign what it wanted.
The Video Recordings Act 1984 required every videogram supplied commercially in the UK to carry a classification from a designated authority, which in practice meant the BBFC.
It closed the gap that had caused the whole episode: before it, videotape was the only distribution format in Britain with no licensing requirement at all.
Once every tape was classified there was nothing left to prosecute, and the DPP list became a historical document within about a year.
Its longer effect was that the BBFC spent two decades cutting horror on video considerably harder than the same films for cinema, on the reasoning that a tape can be paused, rewound and watched by children. That policy relaxed from the late 1990s.
A drafting error meant the Act was technically unenforceable between 1984 and 2010, because it had never been notified to the European Commission. It was re-enacted in 2010 to fix this.
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.