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In Anne Robinsons first episode of Countdown she cuts an authoritative figure. Chatty and encouraging, the presenter many remember from her days as the cutting, contentious host of The Weakest Link is gone almost. Is that as fun as it sounds? she sarcastically asks her first contestant, Steve, of his job as an accountant. Some contestants I have to go much more gently with than I would have done on The Weakest Link, she explains. Others are brilliantly funny, and thats not always been exploited in the past.

When I speak to Robinson, shes already filmed her first 30 episodes. Quiz shows are notoriously demanding of their hosts and crew and Robinson has been filming five episodes a day in Salfords Media City, three days a week. But after more than 30 years working in television, the 76-year-old is dismissive of the hard work she puts in: Im used to long hours.

Robinson takes over as host of the long-running series today (on Channel 4, at 2:10pm) after Nick Hewer, once better known for his role as one of Lord Alan Sugars advisors on The Apprentice, announced he was leaving last December. She is determined to make the job her own and certainly doesnt take lightly the responsibility of steering the beloved 39-year-old series.

Your guide to what to watch next - no spoilers, we promise

Im professional, so I do worry, she says of her performance. I was anxious at the start simply because I hadnt done it before it would be stupid to think that I was going to be brilliant from day one. It took a bit of time to get my head round the grammar of the programme: where to go and who to talk to next.

The team have been incredibly welcoming, and she finds mathematician Rachel Riley and word expert Susie Dent very impressive. Hewer didnt give her any advice on how to handle the show, though Robinson is unsure of how helpful he would have been, given the changes the production has had to make to stay Covid-secure since he left. Sometimes the break between shows is 15 minutes and theres a very long, one-way system to get back to your dressing room, she says. Nick only had to change his jacket I have to change my whole outfit, get my hair done, redo my lipstick and maybe choose a new necklace.

Robinson was born in Crosby, and spent time in Liverpool as a young adult when she took charge of her mothers poultry dealing business. She started her media career as a trainee newspaper journalist at the Daily Mail in 1967 and went on to have success at The Sunday Times and the Daily Mirror and played a part in breaking huge stories, from the details of legendary music manager Brian Epsteins death to news of Princess Dianas eating disorder.

She moved into broadcasting in 1982 as a regular guest on Question Time, before taking the role as presenter of Points of View, where she stayed for 11 years. She still draws on her journalistic instincts to read how ironic she can be with contestants. In that sense, its no different from how she approached her tenure at The Weakest Link (which ran from 2000 to 2007) her style was funny and edgy in the noughties, but is now often recalled as cruel and bullish.

Viewers with a forgiving view of her performance on The Weakest Link which included mocking players over anything from their appearance (So you havent had any time to work on yourself then? she once asked a beauty therapist) to their perceived sexuality (Why are you dressed like a lesbian?) often put the controversy down to Robinson playing a character, but she doesnt ascribe to such a merciful assessment.

Those conversations arent any different from those youd hear in a newsroom. I never let a thought go unsaid what your mum would say while watching the telly at home. She argues that the competitors were far from lambs thrown to her verbal slaughter and were often in on the ruse.

Quiz show contestants are incredibly feisty and competitive, she adds. I remember asking one man why he was voting off another and he said, If you cant name the Teletubbies then you shouldnt be here.

When I ask how she feels about criticism of the show, she says it was a different time. You cant say a lot of the things that I said now. We have become much more woke. She points out that it took 16 years for Vanessa Feltz, who appeared on a celebrity version of the show, to decide she was upset over Robinsons question, How can someone like you attract gorgeous black boyfriends?

Theres a lot of self-censoring, adds Robinson. Theres a lot of television executives who are too scared to criticise or to allow anything on that has a bit of edge to it. I dont quite know who it is thats deciding I can say this and cant say that.

Robinson is in full support of the recent trend among cultural commentators and the tabloid press of anti-wokeness, then. She thinks the launch of GB News, Andrew Neils 24-hour news channel designed to challenge the homogeneity of the current media landscape, is terrific and refreshing, even if it does need to sort out the lighting.

Even if I dont agree with its more right-wing views, I think it will challenge the woke, which is important.

The broadcasters views on modern feminism in the wake of the #MeToo movement have made headlines in the last few years. On the Today programme in 2017, she said that Forty years ago there were very few of us women in power and we had a much more robust attitude to men behaving badly.

It sparked accusations of victim-blaming and internalised misogyny, but today, she doubles down: Were in a funny place only because my generation put up with all the sexism and got on with it, she says.

We have really terrible women too now that theyve got to the top jobs all that has become much more equal. But these clever women are often lacking in confidence. Im sympathetic to that, but it means that they dont deal with badly behaved blokes as I would.

Women arent naturally geared to the treachery of the workplace and, in my day, if you were there as a woman, you were pretty feisty to start off with. Thankfully, all those jobs are available to women, whether youre feisty or not.

How does she propose we tackle the confidence crisis she sees? I wish that instead of wasting their time doing a masters degree, women could spend a year learning how to cope with office life and how to negotiate a good salary. In her 2002 memoir, she wrote about doubling her salary, and getting a brand new Mercedes Benz included in her contract.

As Rory Bremner, Robinsons first celebrity guest in Dictionary Corner, points out at the top of the opening episode, more men called Des have hosted Countdown than women. Robinson is its first female presenter. Shes proud to hold the title theres one episode where everyone on screen is a woman, we did sort of punch the air a little bit but wishes her appointment didnt come as a surprise.

It shouldnt be astonishing to anyone. It sort of suggests that despite being a woman and therefore not as bright as a bloke Ive been asked to do a job that men normally do, she says.

Weve got a queen of England, weve had two female prime ministers, women can fly aircraft and be High Court judges and do everything men can do its time we took that as read.

You may as well say Im the first presenter with an O negative blood type.

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Countdowns new host Anne Robinson: Theres a lot of self-censoring on TV - iNews

The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a standoff with social media companies over what content gets investigated or blocked online, and who gets to decide. Bikas Das/AP hide caption

The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in a standoff with social media companies over what content gets investigated or blocked online, and who gets to decide.

MUMBAI AND SAN FRANCISCO One night last month, police crowded into the lobby of Twitter's offices in India's capital New Delhi. They were from an elite squad that normally investigates terrorism and organized crime, and said they were trying to deliver a notice alerting Twitter to misinformation allegedly tweeted by opposition politicians.

But they arrived at 8 p.m. And Twitter's offices were closed anyway, under a coronavirus lockdown. It's unclear if they ever managed to deliver their notice. They released video of their raid afterward to Indian TV channels and footage shows them negotiating with security guards in the lobby.

The May 24 police raid which Twitter later called an "intimidation tactic" was one of the latest salvos in a confrontation between the Indian government and social media companies over what online content gets investigated or blocked, and who gets to decide.

While the Indian constitution includes the right to freedom of speech, it also bans expression or publication of anything that risks India's security, public order or "decency." But the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced a long list of new IT rules going beyond this. They require social media platforms to warn users not to post anything that's defamatory, obscene, invasive of someone else's privacy, encouraging of gambling, harmful to a child or "patently false or misleading" among other things.

If the government orders it, platforms are required to take down such material. The rules also require platforms to identify the original source of information that's shared online or, in the case of messaging apps, forwarded among users. Company executives can be held criminally liable if the platforms don't comply.

Many tech companies are aghast. They say these rules violate their users' freedom of expression and privacy, and amount to censorship. Free speech advocates warn that such rules are prone to politicization and could be used to target government critics.

India's Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad (left) and Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar announce new regulations for social media companies and streaming websites in New Delhi in February. India's government has warned Twitter to comply with the country's new social media regulations, which critics say give the government more power to police online content. Manish Swarup/AP hide caption

India's Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad (left) and Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar announce new regulations for social media companies and streaming websites in New Delhi in February. India's government has warned Twitter to comply with the country's new social media regulations, which critics say give the government more power to police online content.

But India with nearly 1.4 billion people is one of the tech companies' biggest markets. The country's hundreds of millions of internet users present a ripe business opportunity for companies such as Twitter and Facebook, especially since they're banned from operating in China.

And India's government like others around the world knows this, says Jason Pielemeier, policy and strategy director at the Global Network Initiative, a coalition of tech companies and other groups supporting free expression online.

"Over time, the governments have become more and more sophisticated in terms of their understanding of the pressure points that large internet companies have and are sensitive to," he says. "Those companies have also, to some extent, become more sensitive as they have increased the revenue that they generate in markets all around the world. And so where you see companies having large user bases and governments increasingly dissatisfied with those companies' responsiveness, we tend to see situations like the one that is currently flaring up in India."

Some companies, including Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, have reportedly complied, at least partially, with the new rules, which took effect May 25. Others are lobbying for changes. Twitter says it's "making every effort to comply" but has asked for an extension to do so. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, has sued the Indian government.

The police raid last month on Twitter's offices in New Delhi came amid squabbles between India's two biggest political parties, accusing each other of spreading misinformation.

Politicians from Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, had been tweeting screenshots of what they claimed was a "media toolkit" used by their main rival, the Indian National Congress party, to amplify online complaints about Modi's handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Twitter's rules about platform manipulation prohibit users from "artificially amplifying" messages.

But the screenshot BJP politicians were tweeting of this alleged "toolkit" was fake. Some of India's most reputable fact-checkers concluded it was a forgery. After its own investigation, Twitter slapped a "manipulated media" label on those tweets by BJP politicians.

The government then asked Twitter to remove that label. Twitter did not. Police raided its offices three days later.

"We, alongside many in civil society in India and around the world, have concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global Terms of Service, as well as with core elements of the new IT Rules," a Twitter spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed May 27 to NPR and other news organizations.

To many observers, it looked like the Indian government was trying to drag Twitter publicly into a dispute between rival political parties, by sending the police to serve Twitter executives with a notice that could have been sent electronically especially during the pandemic.

"Serving a notice of that kind, in the form that played out, just confirms the idea that this is just theater," said Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and founder of India's Software Freedom Law Center.

Choudhary says the optics are troubling. It looks like the Indian government has rewritten the country's IT rules to endow itself with extraordinary powers to silence its critics online. In February, on orders from the Indian government, Twitter blocked more than 500 accounts but then reversed course when it realized many belonged to journalists, opposition politicians and activists.

More recently, the Indian government demanded that social media companies remove news articles or posts referring to the B.1.617 coronavirus variant as the "Indian variant." (The WHO has since renamed this variant, which was first identified in India, as "Delta").

"The government has been trying to either block handles or curb dissent," Choudhary says. "Both the government and [social media] companies are claiming they're protecting users, when it's convenient for them, but users are really the ones left without much power."

Modi's government published its new IT rules on Feb. 25 and gave social media companies three months to comply. So the rules took effect May 25. Twitter is asking for another three-month extension.

"We will strive to comply with applicable law in India. But, just as we do around the world, we will continue to be strictly guided by principles of transparency, a commitment to empowering every voice on the service, and protecting freedom of expression and privacy under the rule of law," a Twitter spokesperson said in the May 27 statement.

One of the requirements Twitter finds most onerous is that it name an India-based chief compliance officer who would be criminally liable for content on the platform. The company says it's worried about its employees in that situation.

Indian government officials say Twitter has already had three months to comply with this and the rest of the requirements.

"You are a giant, earning billions of dollars globally! You can't find a technological solution?" India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, recently said on India's CNN-News18 channel.

Prasad acknowledged that India's social media rules might be more onerous than what tech companies are used to in the United States. But India is a place where mob violence has erupted over rumors shared on social media. The government needs to take extra precautions, he said. And big tech companies could comply with these rules, he insisted, if they really wanted to.

"The same Twitter and social media companies are complying with all the requirements in America! In Australia! In Canada! In England!" Prasad said. "But when it comes to India, they have a double standard."

Tech executives have been grilled about misinformation by members of the U.S. Congress. But when India summons them, they often don't show up. Choudhary says this has fueled anger among Indian politicians, who fume that they're not taken seriously.

"The companies say, 'Our servers are in California. So we don't have this information.' Or, 'We can't come and talk to you,'" she says. "That gives the government justification to say, 'How can you monetize our users, but when we want to have a discussion with you, you claim you're only a sales office?'"

India has reason to be sensitive to the threat of being taken advantage of by foreign powers. It has a colonial past. Even before Great Britain ruled India, a foreign corporation, the East India Company, pillaged it for centuries.

Choudhary calls what big tech companies are doing in India "digital colonialism."

"It's now the Silicon Valley 'bros' who think they can tell us what to do and what not to do," Choudhary says.

In a particularly harshly worded statement issued May 27, the Indian government called Twitter a "private, for-profit, foreign entity" that needs to "stop beating around the bush and comply with the laws of the land." It accused Twitter of "seek[ing] to undermine India's legal system" and blamed the company for what it called "rampant proliferation of fake and harmful content against India."

Last weekend, the Indian government appeared to reject Twitter's request for an extension. It sent the company what it called "one final notice" as a "gesture of goodwill," urging the tech giant to comply with the new social media rules. The government warned of "unintended consequences" if Twitter refuses to comply.

Nigeria's government recently banned Twitter after the company took down a tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari that appeared to threaten separatists. There are fears that India could do the same.

For Twitter, that would be a blow not just to its business interests, but to its avowed commitment to fostering public conversation.

"As much as these kinds of centralized corporate platforms can be frustrating in a number of ways, they are, when it comes down to it, the place where the majority of the world interacts," says Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Years ago, I would have said that companies should stand up to authoritarian governments to tell them, 'Hey, block us if you want to, but we're not going to comply with these restrictions,'" she says. "But as time has gone on, that's become less and less of a viable option. ... For some people, these are really vital channels for accessing a global audience, for reaching people outside of their normal space, especially during the pandemic."

In India, for example, people took to Twitter to source medical supplies and raise money during a devastating COVID-19 resurgence.

On Monday, a Twitter spokesperson told NPR that the company remains "deeply committed to India," has been "making every effort to comply" with the new IT rules and has been sharing its progress with the Indian government.

The same day, Twitter also disclosed to a Harvard University database that it had restricted access within India to four accounts including those of a hip-hop artist and a singer/songwriter that had criticized the Modi government online. To comply with Indian law, Twitter sometimes blocks content in India but allows it to remain visible outside the country.

Twitter and other companies face pressure from other governments too. Around the world, free speech advocates say, there are increasing demands to restrict certain types of speech and for governments to play a greater role in regulating online platforms.

Germany, for example, has a law requiring social media platforms to act quickly to take down illegal speech or face financial penalties.

In the U.S., Democrats are pushing companies to curb misinformation, while Republicans have turned their own complaints about social media censorship into laws like one passed in Florida last month that bars platforms from banning politicians.

Another part of the showdown between India's government and tech companies hinges on privacy.

The government wants to be able to trace misinformation that's shared online. So as part of its new IT rules, it's asking social media companies to be able to identify the "first originator" of any piece of information. It says it will ask for that information only in rare cases where a potential crime is suspected to have been committed.

WhatsApp filed a lawsuit over this last month in the Delhi High Court. The company says it's unable to provide "first originator" information unless it traces every message on its platform which would amount to what it called "a new form of mass surveillance."

"To comply, messaging services would have to keep giant databases of every message you send or add a permanent identity stamp like a fingerprint to private messages with friends, family, colleagues, doctors, and businesses," WhatsApp wrote in an FAQ about traceability on its website. "Companies would be collecting more information about their users at a time when people want companies to have less information about them."

Experts say messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal would likely have to break their end-to-end encryption which ensures only the sender and recipient, not the company or anyone else, can read a message to comply with Indian law. Namrata Maheshwari, an India-based lawyer and policy consultant for the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicts that will have a "chilling effect" on free speech.

"This is problematic for users' right to privacy, because the core promise of end-to-end encryption is that users can communicate safely and securely without any unauthorized access by any third party, including the service provider," she says.

Maheshwari says the WhatsApp lawsuit is one of many filed in various high courts across India challenging India's new IT rules. They bring a key third party judges into the ongoing standoff between the Indian government and social media companies. The lawsuits will be decided over several months, or even years.

"As far as the question of who the stronger entity here is, I actually think it's now the Indian courts," she says. "The battleground has moved."

Editor's note: Facebook, Google and LinkedIn are among NPR's financial supporters.

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India And Tech Companies Clash Over Censorship, Privacy And 'Digital Colonialism' - NPR

For decades, Hong Kongs movie industry has enthralled global audiences with balletic shoot-em-ups, epic martial-arts fantasies, chopsocky comedies and shadow-drenched romances. Now, under orders from Beijing, local officials will scrutinize such works with an eye toward safeguarding the Peoples Republic of China.

The citys government on Friday said it would begin blocking the distribution of films that are deemed to undermine national security, marking the official arrival of mainland Chinese-style censorship in one of Asias most celebrated filmmaking hubs.

The new guidelines, which apply to both domestically produced and foreign films, come as a sharp slap to the artistic spirit of Hong Kong, where government-protected freedoms of expression and an irreverent local culture had imbued the city with a cultural vibrancy that set it apart from mainland megacities.

They also represent a broadening of the Chinese governments hold on the global film industry. Chinas booming box office has been irresistible to Hollywood studios. Big-budget productions go to great lengths to avoid offending Chinese audiences and Communist Party censors, while others discover the expensive way what happens when they do not.

Hong Kongs storied movie industry is as much a pillar of its identity as its food, its soaring skyline or its financial services sector.

During its peak as a filmmaking capital in the decades after World War II, the city churned out immensely popular genre flicks and nurtured auteurs like Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui. It has minted international stars such as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau and Tony Leung. The influence of Hong Kong cinema can be seen in the work of Hollywood directors including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, and in blockbusters such as The Matrix.

Censorship worries have loomed large over Hong Kongs creative industries ever since the former British colony was returned to China in 1997. But concerns that once felt theoretical have become frighteningly real since Beijing enacted a national security law last year to quash the antigovernment protests that shook the city in 2019.

So while few in the local movie industry said they felt caught totally off guard by the new censorship guidelines issued Friday, they still expressed concern that the sweeping scope of the rules would affect not just which movies are screened in Hong Kong, but also how they get produced and whether they get made at all.

How do you raise funds? asked Evans Chan, a filmmaker who has faced problems screening his work in the city. Can you openly crowdsource and say that this is a film about certain points of view, certain activities?

Even feature filmmakers, he said, will be left to wonder in tense anticipation whether their movies will fall afoul of the security law. Its not just a matter of activist filmmaking or political filmmaking, but the overall scene of filmmaking in Hong Kong.

The censorship directives are the latest sign of how thoroughly Hong Kong is being reshaped by Beijings security law, which took aim at the citys pro-democracy protest movement but has had crushing implications for aspects of its very character.

With the blessing of the Communist government, the Hong Kong authorities have changed school curriculums, pulled books off library shelves and moved to overhaul elections. The police have arrested pro-democracy activists and politicians as well as a high-profile newspaper publisher.

And in the arts, the law has created an atmosphere of fear.

The updated rules announced Friday require Hong Kong censors considering a film for distribution to look out not only for violent, sexual and vulgar content, but also for how the film portrays acts which may amount to an offense endangering national security.

Anything that is objectively and reasonably capable of being perceived as endorsing, supporting, promoting, glorifying, encouraging or inciting such acts is potential grounds for deeming a film unfit for exhibition, the rules now say.

The new rules do not limit the scope of a censors verdict to a films content alone.

When considering the effect of the film as a whole and its likely effect on the persons likely to view the film, the guidelines say, the censor should have regard to the duties to prevent and suppress act or activity endangering national security.

A Hong Kong government statement on Friday said: The film censorship regulatory framework is built on the premise of a balance between protection of individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and the protection of legitimate societal interests on the other.

The vagueness of the new provisions is in keeping with what the security laws critics say are its ambiguously defined offenses, which give the authorities wide latitude to target activists and critics.

Tin Kai-man, of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, told the local broadcaster TVB that the industry needed to better understand whether the censors decisions could be appealed after, for instance, they had ruled that a movie could not be shown in Hong Kong because of national security risks.

All of this must first be made clear, Mr. Tin said. We dont want this thing to come in and grow out of control so we start worrying about the impact on movie production.

The new censorship guidelines announced Friday seem directed in part at one specific kind of movie. They say censors should give extra scrutiny to any film that purports to be a documentary or to report on real events with immediate connection to the circumstances in Hong Kong.

Why? The local audience may likely feel more strongly about the contents of the film.

Censors, according to the guidelines, should carefully examine whether the film contains any biased, unverified, false or misleading narratives or presentation of commentaries.

That could spell tougher scrutiny for movies like Ten Years, a low-budget independent production from 2015 that offered dystopian tales of life in a 2025 Hong Kong that is crumpling under Beijings grip. It might also put a chill on documentarians efforts to chronicle Hong Kongs political turmoil.

A short documentary about the 2019 protests, Do Not Split, was nominated for an Academy Award this year, raising global awareness about Chinas crackdown in the city. (The films nomination may have played a role in Hong Kong broadcasters deciding not to air the Oscar broadcast this year for the first time in decades, although one station called it a commercial decision.)

Efforts to bring other politically themed documentaries before audiences in Hong Kong in recent months have become engulfed in bitter controversy.

A screening of a documentary about the 2019 protests was canceled at the last minute this year after a pro-Beijing newspaper said the film encouraged subversion. The University of Hong Kong urged its student union to cancel a showing of a film about a jailed activist.

The screening went on as planned. But a few months later, the university said it would stop collecting membership fees on the organizations behalf and would stop managing its finances as punishment for its radical acts.

Mainland China has long restricted the number of films made outside China that can be shown in local cinemas. But Hong Kong has operated much like any other movie market around the world, with cinema operators booking whatever might sell tickets.

The citys expanded censorship could therefore take a small but meaningful bite out of Hollywoods overseas box office returns.

Joker, the Warner Bros. supervillain film from 2019, was not cleared for release in mainland Chinese cinemas, for instance. But it collected more than $7 million in Hong Kong, according to the entertainment industry database IMDBpro.

China has become more important to Hollywood in recent years because it is one of the few countries where moviegoing is growing. Ticket sales in the United States and Canada, which make up the worlds No. 1 movie market, were flat between 2016 and 2019, at $11.4 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association. Over that period, ticket sales in China increased 41 percent, to $9.3 billion.

As a result, American studios have stepped up their efforts to work within Chinas censorship system.

Last year, PEN America, the free-speech advocacy group, excoriated Hollywood executives for voluntarily censoring films to placate China, with content, casting, plot, dialogue and settings tailored to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials. In some instances, PEN said, studios have been directly inviting Chinese government censors onto their film sets to advise them on how to avoid tripping the censors wires.

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

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Chinas Censorship Widens to Hong Kongs Vaunted Film Industry, With Global Implications - The New York Times

Photo: Courtesy of Magnet

Britain in the 80s was grasped by the talons of Thatcherism: a brand of right-wing politics that upheld the individual and traditional family values. Some (many!) decried it as fascist, a call that became all the more emphatic when the Thatcher government took on Britains industrious towns and cities, closing down mines, mostly in the north and Wales, and destroying entire families livelihoods.

For Prano Bailey-Bond, the first-time director behind Sundance hit Censor, its difficult to separate Britains turbulent contemporaneous politics from the panic around video nasties: gore-heavy, straight-to-VHS B-movies around which the tabloids rustled up a profound moral hysteria, egged on by the state. In Britain at that time, you have job losses, you have welfare being cut. People were living in poverty, she says. So theres going to be more unrest, and I think horror was an easy scapegoat for all the bad in the world it took pressure off politicians, off what was actually going on.

This political reality serves as a tangible through-line in Censor, which follows a relatively simple conceit. Enid, a film censor played by Niamh Algar, is on the front line in Britains war against the nasties; she decides whether theyre fit for public consumption.All the while, shes tormented by the mysterious loss of her sister: Once inseparable, she vanished without a trace when they were young. But when she sits down to rate a particularly graphic film by the notorious gore-hound Frederick North, things begin to spiral, her perception of reality and fiction blurring at an exponential rate. The crescendo Censor eventually hits offers one of the more unsettling dnouements in recent horror cinema.

With Censor being released this week, Vulture chatted with Bailey-Bond about moral panic, why we love watching films that indulge in the most grotesque of body horror, and whether the video nasties, despite their reputation, can be appreciated as art.

Film censorship happens everywhere, but the moral hysteria around video nasties was specific to England in the 80s. Can you tell us a little about that history?

The birth of VHS led to a boom in low-budget horror becoming available. In every country, these films could go directly to the home, be watched and rewatched potentially getting into the hands of children. For various reasons, the U.K.s reaction was one of the most conservative in western countries. Its a moral panic that emerged in the Thatcher era, this idea that these films were going to possess those who watched them, make them throw their moral compass out of the window, and do terrible things: garrote each other with shoelaces, attack each other with axes.

In the Daily Mail, there was an article called Pony Maniac Strikes Again, which was about a bunch of ponies who were attacked. And the police statement in this article said that the attacker was probably influenced by either video nasties or the full moon. So suddenly the real world becomes this supernatural place where were all howling at the moon, and growing hairs, and going out to attack ponies. Its amazing how the tabloid press was about to whip up this moral panic around these films.

There are moments in Censor where you contrast the political violence of the Thatcher era in the background of one scene, theres archival news footage of police cracking down on a miners strike, for example with the grotesque, but otherwise benign, horrors of the video nasties. Why is that?

Its what I see when I look at that footage. Because obviously in the background of all of this were the miners protesting about the mines being closed down and everybody losing their livelihoods. And you see police brutality in the footage thats not being highlighted or looked at as perhaps not the right way to deal with things, when you look back. But some kind of gory, probably campy special effects are supposed to infect someones brain and make them go out and murder somebody.

We dont watch a horror film and then completely lose all of our morals. The reason people do terrible things is not that simple. It comes from somewhere much deeper; it can come from how weve been treated in life and how we feel in our heads. Its such a simple explanation to just blame horror.

It feels like theres a direct line between this moral panic, happening in a very specific political moment, and, say, the hysteria around video games in America over the past decade or so. The idea that games like Grand Theft Auto lead to shootings

Absolutely, and thats sort of why I wanted to set the film in the past, so that you have an objective viewpoint. When we were developing the film, a few people said, Why dont you make it about a contemporary censor? But the period and what was going on is just too rich not to set it then. But you also have distance from it. You can go back and go, Well, in the 50s, it was comic books that were going to turn little boys into horrible big men. And then it was video nasties. And then it was video games. Its been Marilyn Manson; its been rap music.

Specifically with the VHS thing, I found it interesting to think about just how fragile we think we are, or how fragile our moral compasses are as people, that this new piece of technology is going to completely destroy our understanding of right and wrong. Were so scared of technology; were so scared of the things we create and what theyre going to do back to us.

Sometimes the fear of what theyre going to do causes more of a problem than the technology itself. I think youve got that in the fears around social media and what thats going to do to us and how that is warping our perception of reality, which is perhaps warped already, because then we can go into, What even is reality? And we wont go down that road. Maybe were just a frightened species.

What is it with our attraction to the morbid, the grotesque, and gore what attracts us to, say, people being torn limb by limb by zombies, beheadings, and disembowelment?

I think about this a lot. Some people love it, and some people just cant stand it. I know from my perspective its not so much about the gore. Theres something very physical about watching these kinds of films. I think horror is the most similar, of all film genres, to a roller-coaster ride. You can feel the electricity sometimes when youre watching a horror film, and I dont think you get that from other genres. For me, Im really interested in trying to understand why people do bad things. Im really interested in dark minds and picking them apart.

Its a funny one: My sister isnt really into horror, but she loves crime dramas, and, actually, women are the audience for a lot of serial-killer films. Sometimes I think, Is it because we want to protect ourselves? I dont think anyone wants to genuinely put themselves in these horrific situations in real life, but because we know its fiction, theres something very cathartic about it its an adrenaline rush at times, too. I dont have a hard-and-fast answer.Im still trying to work it out.

Theres an early line of dialogue where a film producer hes supposed to be a bit of an asshole, I think shows some artistic appreciation for an eye-gouging scene that Enid wants to cut: Its King Lears Gloucester, he contests. Its Un Chien Andalou. Looking back, do you think the nasties can be framed, and appreciated, as art?

I think some of them can. The video nasties, as a whole, are quite varied in terms of their art. Some of them are only known or spoken about now because they were banned; had they not been banned, I dont think wed be watching them. Some of them were impressively bad.

But some of them I do think of as art: You look at something like [Dario Argentos] Suspiria or [Matt Cimbers] The Witch Who Came From the Sea they are pieces of art, in my opinion. They have a real kind of vision behind them. And theyre quite sophisticated filmmaking in their own way. Its a real range. Theres the really schlocky ones, and there are some really fun, wild ones like Basket Case. But even then, theres art in Basket Case, you know.

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Censor Director Prano Bailey-Bond Is Going to Shock You - Vulture

Two public sessions have been held via Zoom seeking input from the community on the removal of the Potter Hill Dam. The first meeting was on March 18 and the second on June 10. This dam removal effort will affect the residents of both Westerly and Hopkinton. Hopkinton was not made aware of this until March 18. There has been little notice of these public information sessions. These sessions have been online only via Zoom and public comments were limited by the Zoom moderator.

There was a website built after the first meeting to submit questions. These questions and comments are not publicly visible. My questions and others I have spoken with have had no replies after being submitted.

In the most recent public meeting on June 10 there were many people who had their hands raised on the Zoom meeting who were not called upon. For the limited few (including myself) who were called upon, we were not allowed to speak after our question was replied to.

This team has been working on this removal proposal for 10 years and has not fully explained the options reviewed and how decisions were made. There are several unanswered questions that the public should have answered by this team before any work to remove the dam commences in July. There needs to be a public meeting in person that allows the public to comment without censorship.

Jim Duksta

Ashaway

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Letter: Censorship on Potter Hill Dam removal | Letters to Editor | thewesterlysun.com - The Westerly Sun