Stop me if this sounds familiar – you go to get a DVD that looks appealing to you, but the excitement halts when you see a small round shape at the bottom that’s displaying the letters U, PG, or the numbers 12, 15, and 18. These are ratings that suggest the most appropriate audience for the content. (They’re more commonly known as video certificates.) If you’ve ever wondered who decides the ratings, if you look behind the certificate you will see multiple rows of the letters BBFC. This stands for British Board of Film Classification and it’s their job to see a wide variety of films and then, based on the amount of violence, bad language, sex/nudity, and in some cases consumption of alcohol and drugs, decide what the final certificate for a film is before it gets released in cinemas. If you want to know why a film got a specific rating, you can look it up on a cinema website or check the back of DVD.
In case you have somehow missed out, here is an informative description of what each of the ratings means. U stands for universal which means anyone can watch it and there shouldn’t be anything like violence or language harmful to younger viewers. So it’s no surprise that’s the rating given to most kids’ films. PG stands for parental guidance, which again mostly applies to most kids’ films, being more the live action and fantasy kind – like a Roald Dahl adaption or an early Harry Potter. These are normally said to be for anyone from the age of eight and over, the other three certificates need no explaining – it’s either suitable for that age group or it isn’t.
The ratings have been made part of the law, which could result in your being asked about age if you want to see a 15 film but don’t look that age. Similar circumstances apply when buying a DVD – attempting to contravene a rating is often considered illegal. It’s an easily understandable system and for the most part works very well, but there are ways around it.
My first example that I like to call ‘a question of maturity’ I feel demonstrates this very well. For films that are rated 15 and 18, no one under those ages should even be allowed to see them at the cinema but at home with a DVD, parents can determine their child’s maturity and that decides whether or not the child can watch it.
The same question even applies to PG and 12 films since PG claims only eight and over, but I’ve been watching PG films in and out of cinemas since I was five years old, and I don’t personally recall my age, or what I might consider harmful, being questioned. For many years audiences under the age of 12 couldn’t see a 12 film in cinemas, but in the 2000s, thanks to Spider-Man getting a 12 and parents along with under-12s voicing their displeasure about it, local authorities stepped in and mostly gave Spider Man a PG or what they called a PG-12 in certain areas, with the condition that under-12s would be accompanied by an adult.
What happened next feels like a response to this, though Spider-Man apparently had nothing to do with it, the 12A rating was introduced and the first film to receive the honour of being rated 12A was The Bourne Identity which came out later that same year (2002). 12A meant that if a child was under 12 and wanted to see the film, they could go as long as there was an adult present. While that’s quite a good workaround, there has always been one thing about it that does seem confusing, why would a film be rated 12A in cinemas only to be given the standard 12 rating when it’s released on DVD? Wouldn’t it be better if the 12 was kept, but if you looked at the rating information there were details that stated if you wished to take an under 12 to the film, you would have to decide if they were capable of handling the film’s themes and content.
Those are the legal ways of how you can bypass ratings in a cinema, but there is also the opposite side of that, where people (often overconfident children and teenagers) will concoct a plan to sneak into a film undetected and treat it like an Ocean’s-style heist, but sneaking into a film without tickets is considered a crime. If you want to see a film that badly you get a ticket for one film then once past security you go to the intended one. Or take an option that isn’t really thought of but could work as well – which is go with a parent and let them do the talking – you just stand there and be quiet.
While the BBFC presents itself as an organisation with well-meaning intentions, I must admit they sometimes give films the wrong certificate, a key example of this would be with Manhunter (1986) rated 18, and its remake Red Dragon (2002) rated 15. Both films feature scenes of a man being bitten on the mouth; in Manhunter it’s clear that’s what’s going to happen, so it cuts to an exterior shot of a house and just the screaming is heard; yet in Red Dragon we see the whole act onscreen and it is fairly graphic, but given all the other graphic and disturbing imagery featuring in that film, maybe they should swap certificates. But I doubt that will happen as much more violent entertainment has come out since, it’s just something that when comparing the two side by side, I can’t pretend I don’t notice the discrepancy.
I can’t take this subject much further without mentioning the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the American counterpart to BBFC. Whereas we have at least some idea who is on our board, America chooses to keep this quiet, or at least that was the case until the 2000s when a documentary was made about their practices. Two things come to mind for me when thinking of the MPAA.
Firstly in the 1980s, films like Temple of Doom and Gremlins met with a less than stellar reception due to their violence and how they were inappropriate for children. Stephen Spielberg (director of Temple and producer of Gremlins) proposed something to go in the middle of the ratings system, to sit between PG and R (which for America normally encompasses what would either be 15 or 18 in the UK). With that the PG-13 rating was born and continues to be a mainstay of adolescent crowd-pleasers in the US.
Secondly when it comes to the R rating and the kind of films they cater for, you can still take anyone 9 years or over as long as they have an adult with them (similar to the 12A in Britain), but once again the final decision rests with the parent.
BBFC also have their questionable moments, one of the most notable being in 2002 when they graced the latest Ken Loach film, Scottish drama Sweet Sixteen, with an 18 rating due to the massive amount of swearing, particularly singling out the usage the c-word. The only real case made for it was that swearing was common language in that part of the country, but the rating remained. This resulted in much controversy, most of it from Loach himself who thought that with it being rated 18, people that lived a similar life to those in the film couldn’t see it. He clearly had strong feelings about this since he admitted in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that he encouraged teenagers to break the law just to get into the film. There were some complaints about the film which resulted in the local authority that oversaw the area where the film had been shot stepping in again and holding screenings where the film was rated 15.
2002 was clearly an interesting time to be in the classification business. Let’s also not forget the time the BBFC had to watch a ten-hour film of paint drying on a wall. Unsurprisingly they had no option but to give it a U.
No matter what your personal opinion of them is, you have to admit the BBFC do serve a useful purpose. They rate the films that make our cinema visits, movie nights with friends or family, and the rare occasions you get to watch a film in school, all the more enjoyable.
If I could properly say what I think of the BBFC and video certificates in general, it can best be summed up with words from a short clip courtesy of the Video Standards Council that featured in a lot of Warner Brothers 2000s tapes.
“Video certificates are there to give you the chance to make the right choice”.
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