the UK seems to be saying "f*ck censorship"

Before ever traveling to Peru, I spent a month studying abroad in London in January 2008 and boy, was that an experience as well! London is fantastic and I hope to live there again someday for a few years. Thinking back on my time spent in London, the lack of media censorship really surprised me so let me divulge a bit.

When listing the differences between the United Kingdom and the United States, one usually thinks of spelling, gastronomy, and driving on the wrong side of the road, rather than film and television censorship. After spending some time month in London, I find myself wondering if there is even such a thing as censorship in the UK. Growing up in the United States, a country with a largely puritan background and strict entertainment censorship laws, I was quickly surprised at how relaxed the entertainment industry is in London with regards to what is deemed suitable for the public. In one hour on a basic cable network, I was exposed to over forty words considered vulgar under US censorship laws and two scenes of full-frontal nudity. Would this behavior be seen on television in the US? Possibly on cable channels, but certainly not on a basic network channel during primetime hours. After the Janet Jackson Super-bowl fiasco a few years ago, the US has placed harsher penalties on networks that display “inappropriate” themes, words, or scenes, while the UK appears to have limited amounts of censorship within the entertainment industry.

While sexual content can be treated as pornography, the lack of existing UK legislation allows shocking images to become the norm. Two twenty-year old gentlemen from Bath who I interviewed explained that since they grew up with lenient censorship laws, they are not surprised to see or hear controversial material. However, these two gentlemen are surprised at the shocked reactions of Americans to the “inappropriate” material deemed suitable to show in the UK.
Regarding film censorship, Roman Polanski’s gruesome adaptation of Macbeth, which was released in 1971, offers a brutally realistic and horrifying visual account of the play. The terrifying scene in which Lady Macduff, having already witnesses the murder of her son, runs through the castle as an attempt to escape and instead beholds the rape of her servants and stumbles into a room piled with blood-smeared corpses, is indeed the most controversial section of the film, aside from Lady Macbeth’s nude scene. Hollywood studios refused to finance the film and the US cut the 140 minute-long film to 90 minutes before it could be released to the public in the US due to the relentless explicit violence and nudity displayed in the film. In the UK, however, the film was never censored and the UK National Board of Review named Polanki’s Macbeth the best film of 1971.

Censorship in the United Kingdom has a long history with variously stringent and lax laws in place at different times, although a much more liberal approach has been taken in recent years. The terms “indecency” and “obscenity” are often used in the United States as if they were synonyms, or as if “obscenity” was a stronger form of “indecency.” Laws in the United Kingdom, however, appear to have two contradictory legal definitions of ‘obscenity’, whereas ‘indecency’ is under-defined.

The definition of obscenity, used in the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and the Theatres Act of 1968, rests on the earlier common law definition of the concept, which defined obscenity as a “tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (R v. Hicklin 1868). It should be noted that in practice, within the UK, the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 is used almost exclusively against explicit pictorial material dealing with what is generally regarded as “deviant behavior” or in other words, bestiality, bondage, pedophilia, and sado-masochism.
When it comes to ‘indecency’, the word seems to mean shocking and disgusting but less so than obscenity. According to British law in the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, indecency covers “anything which an ordinary decent man or woman would find to be shocking, disgusting, or revolting.”



The equation is simple: Those who have power get to censor, and those who lack power get silenced.

Supporting free speech means you may have to hear and see expression that you don’t necessarily like. However, if you cave in to censorship, you will still hear expression you don’t like—from the “Powers That Be”—and be left without a voice to counter it.

As the United Kingdom seems to be saying, “Don’t be fooled.”