‘Sex and Violence’: The Whitehouse Campaign

Abstract

Obscenity, it has been held since a legal judgement in 1868, is the tendency to deprave and corrupt and in the years that followed this ruling a number of literary and scientific works fell foul of the law.¹ It is hardly surprising, then, that with the shifts in values we discussed in the first chapter, pressure from the Society of Authors and others should have brought about reform in the law at the end of the fifties. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act permitted those accused of obscenity to argue that the material in question had been taken out of context or had redeeming qualities of literary, scientific or other value. Materials held to be obscene are not merely regulated by the 1959 Act (and the minor changes introduced in a similarly named act in 1964). While legislation passed in the late seventies extended the Act to film shows, cinema was primarily the province of the British Board of Film Censors, established early in the century, which viewed films and decided whether or not to grant them a certificate indicating that they could be exhibited. If this was decided, however, this did not automatically mean that they could be shown since local authorities were entitled to refuse their showing within their area. As for broadcasting, it was not covered by the Obscene Publications Act but instead was regulated, in the case of independent companies, by the Television Act 1954 which set down that broadcasters should avoid offending against ‘good taste and decency’.