Bound and Gagged: A secret history of obscenity in Britain comes in a dust jacket of brown paper, in a jocular allusion to the way that "dirty books" were once disguised. There may be an irony here that Alan Travis has missed; his book is not itself obscene, but it does perhaps fall foul of Britain's censorship laws, in committing the common-law offence of blasphemy.
Travis makes an elegant case for the reform or even abolition of Britain's existing obscenity laws. He traces a history of the law from the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, created to control erotica and pornography in Victorian Britain, to the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which remains in force. The specific episodes he enlists to demonstrate how the law has been applied, and those moments at which it proved unworkable or unjust, are familiar ones: prosecutions of Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover; of Oz magazine; The Romans in Britain and Gay News. These episodes have all been argued over before, but Travis (the Home Affairs editor at the Guardian) has fresh information gleaned from documents in the Public Record Office, kept secret under thirty-year or even 100-year rules, but, in several cases, released early to the author.
By rehearsing again the more extreme cases of police and governmental zeal in prosecutions of literature (Genet was still pulped by HM Customs officials in the 1950s, for instance), Travis makes a persuasive case for change. The policemen and MPs who insisted that such works were dangerous did so despite their ignorance and lack of education; some of the funnier passages in Bound and Gagged are quotations from the likes of DC Archibald Bodkin on Ulysses: "I have not had the time, nor may I add the inclination, to read through this book . . . . I am entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant to the rest of the book or indeed what the book itself is about. I can discover no story."
The rhetoric used against the written word (so rarely prosecuted after the Chatterley fiasco) is still routinely employed against cinema, video and the Internet, and the laws and structures that allowed these now farcical prosecutions, impoundings and book-burnings to occur are often still in place. For example, Travis rightly calls attention to the anomaly by which Customs officials employ a different test of obscenity on material entering the country, from that which is applied to material prosecuted within the country.
Where the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 provided for the "artistic and literary merit" defence (and the need to prove that a work was liable to "deprave or corrupt" those likely to encounter it), which eventually put paid to prosecutions of books, the Customs laws only insist that the material should be "indecent or obscene" (undefined properties determined mainly by the taste of officials; their decisions can be challenged, but it is a lengthy and expensive process).
The book highlights once again how a confusion of laws has led to undesirable prosecutions and inappropriate powers being vested in officials and government ministers. This is particularly true of video censorship in the wake of the 1984 "video nasties" legislation. Travis shows how a controversy was started by the religious Right and various newspapers, how the police tried to prosecute horror videos for obscenity (confiscating films like Apocalypse Now and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, having confused them with Cannibal Apocalypse and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, respectively), and how the law was passed because juries could not be trusted to find the films obscene.
David Mellor smugly trumpeted this last fact in his speech in the House of Commons supporting the 1984 Act. A jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court had failed to find a tongue-in-cheek horror movie, The Evil Dead, obscene. (This had been "the number one nasty", according to Mary Whitehouse. It is notable that the film is now respectable once more, and widely available.) Mellor said: "The classic simplicity of the bill is its proposal that the only matter of concern to the courts will be whether a video has a certificate." So an unelected board, run by Home Office appointees, can prejudge obscenity in videos in this country, because the public cannot apparently be trusted to judge the matter themselves; the full story is told in exemplary detail in The Video Nasties (1984), edited by Martin Baker (not cited by Travis), which lays bare a conspiracy in which commissioned research was cut short, hijacked and distorted, to the point where its authors disowned it; yet it still helped to swing the argument in the Commons.
It is this piece of legislation that brings us indirectly to the revival of the offence of blasphemy. The poem "The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name" by James Kirkup, printed in Gay News in 1977, suggested a homosexual relationship between a Roman centurion and the crucified Christ; it was successfully prosecuted under Britain's laws on blasphemy, and, as Travis says, is "still banned" in this country, the law not having changed in the interim. (Travis is wrong, though, to say that the law is still on the statute books; the statute law was revoked quietly in 1967, but the common-law offence survives.) Travis quotes extensively from the poem, including the most offensive parts. It is hard to see how he and his publishers have not committed the offence themselves.
Travis may be relying on his own misunderstanding of the law in question. When British Muslims, at the time of The Satanic Verses affair, asked if Salman Rushdie could be prosecuted for blasphemy, it was pointed out that the law applied to Anglican Christianity. This realization did lead to suggestions that the existing common-law offence should either be abolished or extended to take in other faiths, but no government was going to risk the attendant controversy. Best, surely, to let sleeping dogs lie. And so John Patten, then Minister of State at the Home Office, wrote in 1989 that the government would never use the law. But such assertions are not legally binding. The law remains in force.
Indeed, Travis overlooks the fact that the law is still being employed, and, indeed, employed and supported by the British Government. Nigel Wingrove's video Visions of Ecstasy was not granted a certificate (rendering it unsaleable in Britain), on the grounds that the British Board of Film Classification felt it might be blasphemous, and were not able to pass a video which contravened British law. Blasphemy, of course, is decided by a jury; but the prior restraint afforded by the Video Nasties legislation meant that Wingrove's film could never get as far as being prosecuted, when it could be properly decided whether it was blasphemous. Wingrove's appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, that this prior restraint contravened his right of free expression, was turned down.
We have to consider whether the book under review is therefore blasphemous; especially since the intention of authors and publishers have sometimes been taken into account in such cases, but not always – the interpretation of the 1977 Gay News ruling overturned decades of precedent in ignoring all factors (context, literary merit, intention) bar the offensiveness of the material. I am not suggesting that Alan Travis's book should be prosecuted, only that it could be; and, as his account proves, test cases have done a great deal to change laws in the past.