SEX in the NEWS
 

I See Naked People
05/08/2002 Empire Online

Being paid to watch movies all day may be most of our readers idea of a dream job, but the censors working at the British Board of Film Classification are apparently finding it tough going. It appears that the daily diet of sex and violence is proving too much, resulting in a psychotherapist being brought in to counsel the board's employees.

'The censors are freaking out,' a source told the Sunday Times this weekend. 'They are often having to do solid hard-core porn all day . . . the intellectual content of the job is not what it was.' Anyone at the board worried that they might becoming desensitised to the content of the films they watch is being offered a session with the therapist.

The British courts decision a couple of years ago that any porn movie for sale in sex shops also had to be cleared and rated R18 by the censors has been blamed for an increase in the number of skin flicks the censors now have to watch. The full-time team of 16 censors wade through an astonishing 10,000 films a year between them (not all, we hasten to add of the titillating variety).