Before the 1960s the stance of the conservative establishment was to stifle open discussion and portrayal of sexual matters, to suppress pornography, to encourage chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it, to outlaw homosexual relations, to strongly discourage other forms of sexual deviancy and to denounce 'immorality', a catch all word covering a multitude of practices regarded as objectionable. Such a hard line position came to grief with the publicity surrounding the Profumo Affair in 1963, which revealed to a bemused public the sexual escapades of their betters. Many people began to ask why it was acceptable for those in authority to indulge themselves in this way whilst everybody else was expected to conform to a strict moral code. Britain at the time was still largely under the control of a conservative establishment with traditional values, which suddenly appeared to lack a credible response to this new challenge. As a consequence before very long the floodgates were opened and a new sexual frankness emerged. The public swiftly demonstrated an appetite for matters sexual, both in practice, and vicariously, through greatly increased media coverage and the wider availability of sexually explicit material. Opposition to these changes quickly crumbled, the only major exception being the determined campaign of Mary Whitehouse against 'permissiveness', a word with which she will forever be associated.
The level of censorship in Britain before the 1960s will strike many of the younger generation as near incredible, brought up in a society where sexual imagery and discussion forms an all pervasive feature of the popular media. It is true that in the pre-permissive era newspapers such as the News of the World attracted a large readership through the reporting of the salacious details of court cases. But this took place within a framework in which traditional values were upheld, and those who transgressed this code were duly censured. There was clearly a substantial amount of hypocrisy in this approach, but most people at the time appeared to support the system, and many of those who did not chose discretion by paying lip service to it. It might be difficult to square this heavy censorship with the often-proclaimed right to freedom of expression, which is sometimes claimed to be a traditional feature of the British way of life. However, the establishment at any given time whether politically correct, as now, or conservative, as in the 1950s, tends to define free expression through the prism of its own values, leading to a marked lack of sympathy for views contrary to those shaped by their own perspective. This results in a willingness, sometimes even a determination, to suppress them. So, for example, in the 1950s the issue of race could be debated relatively honestly (at least by the standards of today) but not sexual issues.
The law governing censorship in Britain, the Obscene Publications Act 1959, has been found to be extraordinarily flexible since it has gradually permitted the publication of a wider and wider range of sexually explicit material. The test of obscenity is that 'taken as a whole' a work must 'tend to deprave and corrupt', a wording which dates from a court judgement made as long ago as 1868. However, the 1959 Act introduced a new defence, namely, that publication is in 'the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other matters of general concern'. The flaws in the Act are fairly obvious since words such as 'deprave', 'corrupt', 'obscene' and 'indecent' are both subjective and nebulous. Everybody has their own ideas on what constitutes 'indecent' and 'obscene' and there is likely to be a huge range of opinion on the matter. Similarly, the assumption that exposure to, or interest in, sexually explicit writing or images is a sure test that an individual must be 'depraved' or 'corrupt' is one that appears to have gone untested when the 1959 Act was passed. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, juries reached the conclusion that an interest in sexual matters did not necessarily mean that individuals were, or were likely to become, 'depraved' or 'corrupt'. As a result there was an explosion in the availability of sexually explicit material without any artistic, or indeed any other, merit. Sales of such 'literature' grew enormously, allowing a number of 'entrepreneurs' who identified a 'gap in the market' to become very rich. The conservative establishment was forced onto the defensive as this 'free-market' activity mushroomed.
The trial of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover took place in October 1960. This was a time when the first stirrings of social change were becoming apparent, reflected in the publicity generated by rock & roll, angry young men and a new social realism in the cinema and theatre. Nevertheless, censorship was still taken seriously, only a few years earlier a Soho bookseller had been jailed for two months solely for the 'crime' of selling the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The defence in the Lady Chatterley trial produced 35 witnesses, including bishops and leading literary figures, such as Dame Rebecca West, E.M. Forster and Richard Hoggart. The prosecution, on the other hand, failed to find any witnesses to condemn the book, other than the police inspector to whom Penguin had 'published' it. The prosecution counsel compounded this weakness by crassly asking the jury, to widespread ridicule, whether 'It is a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?' The jury took just three hours to return a verdict of not guilty and within a year Lady Chatterley's Lover had sold two million copies. The absurdity of banning a work by a major literary figure soon became apparent, with the result that the whole principle of censorship became fatally discredited. During the next decade or so further high profile trials such as Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the School Kids’ edition of Oz, resulted in defeats for the prosecution and further undermined the principle of upholding laws on censorship.
During this period a similar relaxation took place on what could be shown in cinemas. At the time the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body set up by the film industry and its distributors, was responsible for the pre-censorship of all films shown in public cinemas. Although local authorities had the final legal responsibility, in practice they nearly always accepted the BBFC certificate. The system appeared to work, since during the 1950s cinemas attracted large, albeit declining, audiences, and there appeared to be no great clamour for significant change. The films themselves were entertaining, with mostly good quality acting, although the portrayal of working class characters could sometimes be patronising and stilted. Conventional morality was upheld, incidents of adultery or infidelity were rare and, if they did occur, were stigmatised. The screening of any overt sexuality was proscribed.
At the start of the 1950s only a few households had television, but by the end of the decade it had become a feature in the majority of British homes. Although there was no decline in the quality and standard of films shown, cinema attendance nevertheless fell throughout the decade as a result of this new competition. This trend particularly affected family audiences and older people. By the early sixties many cinemas had closed, whilst those remaining became more dependent on the newly enriched youth market. Both the climate of the time and commercial pressures prompted film producers to become bolder in addressing sexual themes. Since they were starting from a highly puritanical base, the honesty and realism of films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Kind of Loving had wide appeal and the acclaim they received was well deserved. However, it is unlikely such films would have been given a certificate just a few years earlier.
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