Endorsements

This important work explores local film censorship activity across Britain and Northern Ireland from earliest days of cinema to the coming of video on the 1980s. Drawing on archival material from different locations, it highlights the systems and mechanisms being deployed to control and regulate film at local level and what was driving and informing this local activity. While attitudes towards contentious films are shaped by period and cultural attitudes, they are also shaped by location and particularly local conceptions of taste, taboo and acceptability. From independently appointed censors, to committees who provided stringent scrutiny of all contentious titles, film censorship differed widely across local areas and regions. Films considered included well-known contentious titles, sex-education films, material intended to be shown on a Sunday, and titles from the horror, crime and adventure genres. Providing examples from Aberdeen, Bexhill, Belfast, Wakefield and Cheltenham as well as across Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Cornwall, Glamorgan and Berkshire, this work highlights the particular local inflections given to the censorship of film and charts how different interventions operated, why they endured or why they came abruptly to an end. It reveals how place specifically informs and shapes film censorship and it situates these findings alongside interventions from the British Board of Film Classification, the Home Office, the Greater London Council, and The Public Morality Council. This detailed, historical exploration offers new insights into British local film censorship and how it contributed to debates about film and cinema taking place across the 20th century.