Ban the Sadist Videos! (2005)

Written and Directed by David Gregory

This British documentary has to do with a movement to ban certain video content in the 1980s.

This issue emerged through the media technology breakthrough of home video. VHS videotape technology became widespread toward the end of the 20th Century. This meant that people, for the first time ever, could watch movies of their own choice at home, bypassing the gate keeping of theatrical cinema and broadcast TV. These videotapes were mostly rather expensive to buy in the early days of this boom, so a number of stores opened up to serve the market with video rental.   
This presented a new wild world of unregulated content availability.

The British Board of Film Censors, later “Classification” (BBFC) was established in 1912 by the film industry as a way of regulating itself and avoiding government censors stepping in. Anyone familiar with older British movies is familiar with the slide of approval “This is to Certify that (Movie name) Has Been Passed for Universal Exhibition.”
In the early days of home video BBFC had no jurisdiction over this content. 

An uproar arose among people concerned with the effect of hardcore violent content on the general population and children in particular. This also played out in the sensationalist British press which got to play both sides of the game in that they could draw readers in with descriptions of the horrid content at the same time as calling for something to be done about it all.
This documentary is about this campaign to ban or regulate. It is slanted to unlimited freedom discounting the claims of harmful effects on children and the community in general of hardcore violent video content.
It tells us how the BBFC in 1984 got jurisdiction over censoring home video as well.

It’s an interesting documentary and it brings up the issue of what effect video has on people. Do we really know? Is there any way of knowing and measuring such things? If one takes the approach that video has no impact at all then why have corporations spent billions or trillions on TV advertising content in the past 70 years or so since the dawn of the ubiquitous broadcast video age? 

If home video has no effect then apparently it was some other magic that elevated a failed real estate developer into the highest office in the USA directly after being featured as a wise business leader in a very successful prime time TV reality show for 14 years on one of the three major networks.

Is the effect of video content on our reality settled?