RATED M
This story is rated M for mature audiences. It may contain painful memories about a day spent watching porn.
Part of my job as TV presenter/ producer/ editor/ amazing person (ok I added that last one), requires me to classify my own programs. After a couple of years of educated guessing, (“Side-boob? I reckon that’s about an M”) my work decided to err on the side of caution and send us all to a TV rating classification course.
The training room was like any other I’ve been to – groups of desks, water and Mentos lollies on top, a bigger desk at the front for the teacher, and a huge white projector, which would later become the subject of my nightmares.
Name badges on, the day began with each person saying where they worked, and what they would like to learn. The answers were pretty standard, so I decided when my turn came around, I would try to break the ice by making a joke.
I repeated my script in my head, feeling the excitement rising as everyone in the room turned to look at me. I took a deep breath and said, “Hi, I’m Alicia, and basically I’m just here to watch porn.”
The few nervous twitters I received weren’t quite as loud I had imagined, and the trainer looked at me seriously and said, “Well, that’s what we are going to do.”
There are a couple of different categories to consider when you are figuring out what rating a TV show should have: coarse language, drug use, sex, violence; all that good stuff. We kicked things off relatively mildly with coarse language.
I have to admit; I did get a small kick out of writing the “c” word in my notebook, and I had a small giggle upon hearing one of my colleagues ask quite seriously, “So… one bitch is ok, but a whole lot of them isn’t?”
But, as so often happens, this coarse language was just a gateway to the harder, and more damaging stuff: drug use.
The video examples started with a scene from “Weeds”, and progressively got worse, moving through cocaine to a clip showing a girl shooting heroin into her eyeball.
Before I could pass out, it was time for a break, some cookies and nervous chatter about the next subject. Sex.
I did my best to appear mature when the instructor taught us about the level of thrusting allowed in an MA film, and nodded in what I hoped was a ‘knowing’ way when he explained how any “genital detail” could dramatically affect the rating. Now, I’m no prude, but when the video clips showed the most extreme examples of films that were so bad, they were denied classification; I had to escape for an extended bathroom break. Unfortunately I returned when a particularly graphic moment had been paused on the projection screen. The expression on my fellow trainees faces was akin to a scene out of “A Clockwork Orange”.
By the time lunch rolled around, nobody was speaking, or looking into each other’s eyes. I felt like we should all be wearing raincoats and be huddled around dirty magazines in an adult shop instead of eating sandwiches. And violence was next.
I spent a great portion of the afternoon trying to avoid looking at the screen by pretending to be writing important notes, when in reality I was scribbling ‘oh my god oh my god oh my god’ over and over, and trying to figure out how to sum up this experience in a 140 character tweet.
At the end of the day I found a quiet corner, where I curled up in a ball, rocked myself back and forth, stared at nothing and tried to remember if there was any good in the world. “Rainbows… lollipops… unicorns… butterflies… la la laaa…” was the best I could come up with.
On the good side, I’m no longer shocked at the mild sex and violence in everyday films, and I’m now officially allowed to classify the programs I produce. Until next year, when I have to go back for a refresher course. But this time, I’ll be taking my glasses. The ones with the fake eyes on the front
