Britain applies ratings to music videos. Including opera?

Jon says:

At present documentary, educational, music and sports releases can be released as ‘exempt’ from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) approval, unless they contain material that would normally attract a 15 or an 18 certificate (the censors haven’t used an ‘A’ rating for decades).

The changes now proposed by the BBFC would restrict this exemption and would require more music releases, including operas, to be certificated. In effect the threshold for certification is being moved from ’15’ to ’12’. Even so the material shown above would probably still fall within the exemption (for example, the new threshold for ‘nudity’ in such releases to be certificated includes the requirement that genitalia be visible – Natalie Dessay’s faked naked breasts in Giulio Cesare are OK).

Although this change may be being made in response to concerns about pop music videos, Miley Cyrus and her ilk are also likely to still be exempt (and in any case, certification such as this doesn’t apply to TV or the internet where most of the kids will watch these videos).

The main reason for hoping that operas remain exempt is the additional cost associated with certification by the BBFC. For example, the charge for passing a video of Parsifal would be about £2K. As the audience for opera videos is not large, I suspect production companies would prefer not to have this additional charge.