The latest “random film of the day” card handed me Scum from 1979 — Alan Clarke’s drama about a borstal, Britain’s institution for juvenile offenders. The card was handsome, but the real bomb lay in the notes: a year before the cinema version, an almost identical film had existed in a TV version, for the Play for Today slot — and the BBC had banned it from itself. A shelf, a safe, fourteen years of silence. The story sounds legendary, so I went digging — and it turned out to be even worse than the legend: no outside censors, no secret morality police at the moment of decision. The film was buried by two of the Corporation’s own managers, and their motives have never been articulated to this day.
First — what a borstal was, because the whole plot hangs on that word. The idea was born out of the Gladstone Committee report of 1895: teenagers had to be pulled out of adult prisons. In 1902, the first reform institution opened in the Kent village of Borstal (the place name became a common noun), and the Prevention of Crime Act 1908 enshrined the system in law. And then comes the sentence few people notice: by the seventies, borstals were already being dismantled. The workshops had been closing since the start of the decade; from 1972, detention centres and community service orders replaced them, and the Criminal Justice Act 1982 officially buried the term. Clarke was filming an epitaph for a system dying before his eyes — and the BBC itself banned that epitaph for fourteen years, longer than the system survived after the ban.
Roy Minton’s screenplay grew out of conversations with former inmates (then euphemistically called “trainees”); Minton and Clarke believed the only honest way to condemn the system’s violence was to show it head-on, without leaving anything to the imagination. It was produced by Margaret Matheson. In the lead — twenty-year-old Ray Winstone from Hackney (by then a boxer from London’s legendary Repton club: 80 wins from 88 bouts, London schools champion); Phil Daniels was a year younger. Running time: 78 minutes, three interwoven stories: the rise of the new boy Carlin, who takes a wing from “daddy” Banks — with the famous blow from two snooker balls in a sock to the nose; the quiet Davis and the rape in the greenhouse, after which he slashes his wrists; and Archer — an intellectual serving two years for financial fraud, who wages war on the administration through hunger strikes and civil disobedience. Over it all — a deal between some of the warders and the stronger inmates: money in exchange for order. Not a single note of music, not one line of moralising voice-over.
The mechanics of the ban are the tastiest part. The film was finished in the summer of 1977; its details had already gone to the Radio Times for the week beginning 5 November. The team meekly complied with the required cuts (under pressure from Mary Whitehouse’s campaign): remove one of the two suicides, take out the actual moment when the snooker balls hit the face, shorten the greenhouse sequence. In October, with the completed film waiting to air, BBC One controller Bill Cotton — who had just replaced Brian Cowgill — shelved it. The new managing director, Alasdair Milne (in the chair since July), backed him; according to the academic account, the television film was considered “too polemical” both at the Home Office and by Cotton — who, incidentally, also served as a magistrate. No legal formula for the ban exists to this day: programme rules prohibited broadcasts in “bad taste and offensive to public feeling,” even though standards of taste, as researchers dryly observe, “were never defined.” A replacement went into the 8 November slot — Oy Vay Maria, which also picked up awards.
What followed is the finest plot in the BBC’s trash saga. In January 1978, Matheson carries a copy out of the Corporation building and shows it to the press in Soho; Minton titles it The Billy Cotton Banned Show — an insult to the name of the programme presented by the censor’s father. Front pages, uproar; Guardian television critic Peter Fiddick goes to argue with Milne live on Tonight — and Milne, with a straight face, refuses to concede that the film can be shown at all. And in the auditorium for that screening sits film producer Clive Parsons — who would later say he was “blown away” — and persuades Clarke to reshoot the whole thing for the big screen. According to executive producer Don Boyd, Clarke’s first impulse was to rewrite the script for “spectacle” — a mistake he did not make: the same Minton, the same camera without anaesthetic.
The result was one of the strangest pairs in British screen history: 78 minutes against 97, a tiny television budget against £250,000 (distributor GTO, X certificate from the BBFC — June 1979). The same faces returned: Winstone, Daniels, Blundell, Burdis, Murray — in their roles. The only major casting loss was Trelfall (Archer), who had gone to the Royal Shakespeare Company: Mick Ford replaced him. The main narrative operation was the “missus” thread: Carlin asks the newcomer Rhodes to be his “missus,” making clear that he himself is not one of them; the film cut the line. Winstone admitted he felt uncomfortable (“probably felt too macho”) and regretted it; Minton thought dropping it was a mistake — the scene made Carlin vulnerable where vulnerability cost lives. Compare the cameras: in the TV version, Davis’s rape happens almost entirely off-screen — the lens stays on a warder looking through the greenhouse window; in the film, it goes on and on, in close-up, in distorted faces. And the ending: the governor’s speech about “making men” and about how “there is no violence here” (an evangelical Christian in the chair — a wrenching BFI bullseye); in the television film, Banks, beaten by Carlin, is in hospital afterwards, while in the film he stands in the general formation in the final silent scene.
The box office was anecdotal: premiere in Toronto on 12 September, London on the 20th, at the Prince Charles Cinema; fifth in the London box office with £18,074 in its first week (for a film without stars or advertising — respectable). In the United States, over its entire theatrical run — $5,405; the industry does not understand miracles. Tim Roth went to see Scum at the Prince Charles five or six times: “It’s the film that made me want to become an actor. I watched it and thought: if these guys can do it, so can I. It seemed as though Clarke had picked them straight off the street.” In 1983, the VHS landed squarely in the epicentre of the video nasties panic, while Channel 4 aired the cinema version that same year — and that was when Whitehouse went to war: a private prosecution, the High Court, victory (the legal bill was paid by an anonymous donor), reversal on appeal. A year earlier, the Criminal Justice Act had closed the borstals. In other words, the system the film saw as eternal died before it was allowed to be shown — even the moral establishment did not make it in time.
Clarke died of cancer in July 1990. BBC Two showed the TV version on 27 July 1991 — the date comes from the BBC Written Archives via Rolinson; retellings often confuse it, crediting Channel 4 instead (a conflation with the 1983 cinema version). Daniels later put the difference between the versions without any theory at all: “I loved the original because we were younger, and that made everything scarier. We were vulnerable kids being beaten by men, and then beating each other up — in every way, physically, morally, sexually, all that shit, inside a Victorian building. In the two years between the shoots, we grew up — and we were no longer vulnerable.” In the DVD commentary, Winstone calls Clarke the greatest influence on his career. Paul Greengrass, who worked as an assistant in the production department, described Scum, Made in Britain, Elephant, Contact and The Firm as “the toughest, most brilliant and truthful dramas ever to be shown on British television,” and remembered the director’s injunction: “Shoot more takes — editing is everything. And stop reading the Guardian: everything you need to know, and everything you don’t want to know, is printed in the Sun.” And playwright David Hare delivered the most frightening of all epitaphs for the Corporation at the memorial service: “Along the fault line created by the banning of Scum flowed all the shabby decisions and mean-spirited acts which ten years later left the BBC fighting for its very right to exist in the face of government.”
What can one say by way of synthesis. Scum was banned not because of scenes — but because of people: that was the Guardian’s later diagnosis — it was not the brutality that petrified the executives, but the people Clarke was filming. To show these children and these warders was not “coarseness,” it was a record, and records are dangerous to careers. A system of prohibition without defined standards of taste is a machine in which one controller and one managing director can bury a work on the personal threshold of their disgust, without ever naming it. This morning’s piece was about Quatermass and the Pit — there, the BBC of 1958 was burying Martians in its own basement; apparently, the Corporation had an innate gift for burying its own best things. The difference is that Scum was dug up twice — first by cinema, then by the archive — and the film has survived to reach 89% on Rotten Tomatoes, a remake in Dog Pound, and a reputation as “the most important of the banned.” The best assessment of the ban: the system depicted in the film abolished itself by legislative act in 1982 — nine years before the Corporation finally dared to show the picture.
Sources:
The “Curiosity” column. Written in the wake of a “random film of the day” card, cross-checked against the sources listed above. I later threw out the draft: my initial hypothesis about a “BBC directors’ pact” proved false — the “pact” in the Quietus article describes the warders’ deal with the “daddies” inside the film itself. The quotations from Minton, Daniels, Roth and Hare are in my translation, checked against the originals; the subjective judgements (“snooker balls in a sock” is the best scene involving an improvised weapon in British cinema; Sands, the film’s warder who smiles through the greenhouse window, is its worst human being) are mine, and I take full responsibility for them.