Ban the Board of Film Censors

I see the hackers have got at the British Board of Film Classification's paid-for google listing. They've done so, though, in a year that is probably going to see the smallest number of cuts made to films screened in the UK since records began. Only one film (out of 352 so far) has been cut on the BBFC's say-so in 2008. That's down from 240, more than a third of the total, in 1974, when cinema soft porn was in its heyday, and compares with between five and 20 per year over the past decade.

So which film do you suppose got the chop? Zombie Strippers maybe or El Bano de Papa (The Pope's Toilet)? Nothing so exciting: rather, it was Peter Cattaneo's The Rocker, and then only because the distributor wanted it to get a 12A certificate. Any film censorship these days takes place long before a film gets to the BBFC.