The DPP 72

In the summer of 1982 a video dealer in Britain could stock practically anything. Film had been certificated since 1912, but videotape was a new format and nobody had written a law for it, so cassettes went out uncut and unclassified while the cinema print of the same film was still being trimmed by the BBFC.

The press noticed. The Daily Mail ran a campaign, the term "video nasty" entered the language, and the Director of Public Prosecutions circulated a list of titles his office believed could be successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. Police forces used it as a shopping list. Shops were raided, stock was carted off, and a number of dealers went to court.

The list was never stable. Titles went on, titles came off, and the version everybody now cites settled at 72. Of those, 39 were successfully prosecuted and the rest were acquitted or quietly dropped.

The split is less principled than it sounds. Obscenity was a question of fact for a local jury, so the same film could be convicted in one town and cleared in the next. The Evil Dead was prosecuted dozens of times and won more often than it lost. Distributors with money defended themselves and distributors without money pleaded guilty to save costs, which shaped the final tally at least as much as anything on screen did.

It ended with the Video Recordings Act 1984, which required every commercial tape to carry a BBFC certificate. The panic got what it wanted: a licensing regime that made the prosecutions unnecessary. Most of these films are now available uncut in the UK, several of them from the BFI.