Film board to open up '12' rating

Children of any age will be able to watch 12-rated movies at the cinema under radical moves to leave censorship up to their parents.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has confirmed that it plans to make the 12 certificate "advisory-only", like PG, after a nationwide study found 70 per cent of adults were in favour of relaxing the law.

The change will allow children of all ages to see such recent 12-certificate war films as Behind Enemy Lines and Pearl Harbor. It would also open up this summer's blockbuster Spider-Man, and even the Oscar-winning arthouse hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Spider-Man sparked a row last month when four local authorities ignored the BBFC's 12 classification and showed it as a PG.

While the mandatory 15 and 18 classifications will remain, young children will in future be allowed to view 12-rated films provided they have their parents' permission.

However, the long-debated change will be introduced subject to two provisos. Children will have to be accompanied by "responsible adults", a condition absent from PG screenings, where youngsters are routinely dropped off and left alone by their parents.

In addition, film distributors and cinemas will have to publicise clear "consumer advice", explaining why a film has received a 12 rating.

News of the impending change comes in the week the BBFC finally passed an uncut version of the notorious thriller Straw Dogs for video release after an 18-year ban.

A BBFC spokeswoman, Sue Clark, said pre-conditions for relaxing the rules governing 12-certificate films had been dictated by the public's response to the proposals. "We started by interviewing 200 people in Norwich and then organising focus groups and speaking to people as they left cinemas," said Ms Clark. "It turned out to be a snapshot of what we found when we looked at the UK as a whole.

"There was no clear mandate simply to change 12 to an advisory rating. The only way we could get a clear majority in favour was to include the provisos of adult accompaniment and consumer advice. We are now talking to the industry, and until we are satisfied that these conditions are being met we will not commit ourselves to the change."

Arthur Cornell, the chairman of the education charity Family and Youth Concern, wel-comed the guarantee that children would have to be accompanied by adults. But he said he had reservations about cinemas' ability to determine if an adult was "responsible" or not: "Research has shown that 80 per cent of youngsters who play truant from school are with an adult at the time."

* Distributors of one of the few "video nasties" still to be granted a UK certificate are trying to sidestep the censors by putting a frame-by-frame montage of a deleted sequence of their film on the edited video. The BBFC has demanded 31 seconds of a rape scene are cut from The Last House on the Left, by Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven.