Safe for the kiddies

The Golden Age of Censorship
by Paul Hoffman

T. S. Eliot thought it a curiosity of our culture that we use the word ‘taboo’ purely negatively. The word ‘censor’ is surely similar: the notion that any person or society could survive for long without some forms of censorship is fatuous, and yet it is something that tends to arouse disapproval. It implies political oppression, sexual squeamishness, or even worse, the meddling in other people’s psyches in order to ‘put them right’. We are far more likely to protest about it than celebrate its achievements. The Lord Chamberlain’s office became a byword for the kind of fatuity that John Osborne spent decades lampooning.

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So Paul Hoffman’s title might seem inherently paradoxical. But no. This often engrossingly brilliant novel explores the subject with an intellectual honesty that should be saluted. His British Film Secretariat has the job of awarding certificates (or not) to films and videos. The tosh and piffle that they have to sit through generates much fictional mirth. But there is a dark underbelly to all this: vicious sex and violence are also on offer, and the doughty crew has to decide what the public can and can’t handle, and at what age. Hoffman doesn’t cook the books here; he allows a free debate between his characters, and the debate has certainly still not been concluded. The internet has simply complicated it a thousandfold. Did watching violent videos corrupt and deprave the minds of the boys who killed Jamie Bulger? The tabloids certainly wanted to believe this at the time, since they will always applaud any simplification of reality. And yet it is impossible to believe that connecting up your mind to pornographic filth and violence for hours every day can have no effect: none of us is so entirely insulated, surely.