Abstract
In the early 1980s, a powerful campaign erupted in the United Kingdom which sought to control the production and circulation of pre-recorded videos. The ‘Video nasties’ (1982) campaign had particular input from a number of evangelical Christian groups which had grown after the late 1960s (headed by Mary Whitehouse and the National Festival of Light). Since then, the expression ‘video nasty’, and its associations with danger and corruption of children, has lived on—despite even a Daily Mail reviewer acknowledging in 2003 how ‘absurd’ many features of this campaign had been. I was recently prompted to revisit the period and its events, to reconsider the campaign in the light of subsequent debates. Re-examining the evidence, I relate it to the main available theorisations of campaigns of this kind.
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