What bothers the Board the most these days? A look at the BBFC Annual Report for 1988 is most revealing. Not surprisingly perhaps, violence features high on the list, and Rambo III, which was cut by some two minutes for the cinema and lost even more on video, is singled out for particular attention. The report notes its ‘alleged potential for encouraging anti-social violence on the streets of Britain’, and continues:

In terms of films cut, ‘more than twenty needed cuts in violence or glamorisation of weaponry or criminal techniques, nine of these involving violence to women in a sexual context. Six films were cut because of real violence to animals, which is illegal under British law’ (namely the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937).