Rude words are out. DONALD CLARKEis f**king sick of it

OH, FOR f**k’s sake. We’re not talking about f**king swearing again. Are we?

The latest controversy surrounds Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share. Loach and Paul Laverty, his screenwriter, take the view that working-class people in Glasgow will, from time to time, lean towards profanity in daily speech. So they have peppered their dialogue with colourful euphemisms for the sexual act and an intimate part of the female anatomy. No, we don’t mean “shag” or “front bottom”.

Not for the first time, Loach and Laverty have ended up in a tiff with the British Board of Film Classification. The director explained, in a state of befuddled exasperation, that, in order to secure a 15 cert, they had to excise a weirdly precise number of indirect references to the Berkeley Hunt. (Don’t write in if this supposed derivation is apocryphal. We have arbitrarily chosen to believe it.) “We were allowed seven c**ts,” he said. “But only two of them could be aggressive c**ts.”

We could exhaust newsprint debating the unattractive way a term for the female pudenda has evolved into the most extreme swearword. But Loach and Laverty are, surely, correct in their argument that, as realists, they have a duty to write as people speak. Nobody wants them to employ the tedious convention whereby the largely made-up “freaking” is substituted for a more common word.

It does seem extraordinary that, whereas the most extreme violence appears uncut in 15 cert films, the use of too many robust monosyllables can saddle the same film with an 18. What do the certification wonks think will happen to the poor wee bairns? Will they be upset by all the aggressive c**ts? Will they suddenly increase their own usage?

Here’s where it gets interesting. Speaking on the BBC, David Austin, the organisation’s Head of Policy, offered a surprising defence.

“Parents have told us repeatedly that they don’t like multiple uses of the f-word in films that 12-year-olds can see. Parents have become more liberal in some areas. In other areas they have become stricter. But attitude that hasn’t changed at all is parental attitudes to language.”

Consider this statement for a moment. The certifiers are not claiming that the language will deprave or degrade. They are arguing that they restrict bad language because people don’t like their children hearing it.

One could argue that this is a very democratic approach. The BBFC, funded by the film industry, is responding to the people who, through ticket sales, pay their wages. If, however, the board is merely an agency for the dislikes, prejudices and peeves of the public, why bother employing professionals to decide the verdict? It would make more sense to appoint randomly selected juries to decide which film receives which certificate.

Call me a patrician elitist, but I think it behoves such bodies to lead opinion rather than sloping along behind the herd. Give Mr Loach his aggressive c**ts. The world won’t come to an end.