In the 1960s, a brilliant young filmmaker, Peter Watkins, made “The War Game” for the BBC. Watkins reconstructed the aftermath of a nuclear attack on London.
“The War Game” was banned. “The effect of this film,” said the BBC, “has been judged to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”
The then-chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors was Lord Normanbrook, who had been Secretary to the Cabinet. He wrote to his successor in the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend: “The War Game is not designed as propaganda: it is intended as a purely factual statement and is based on careful research into official material … but the subject is alarming, and the showing of the film on television might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent.”
In other words, the power of this documentary was such that it might alert people to the true horrors of nuclear war and cause them to question the very existence of nuclear weapons.
The Cabinet papers show that the BBC secretly colluded with the government to ban Watkins’ film. The cover story was that the BBC had a responsibility to protect “the elderly living alone and people of limited mental intelligence.”
Most of the press swallowed this. The ban on “The War Game” ended the career of Peter Watkins in British television at the age of 30. This remarkable filmmaker left the BBC and Britain, and angrily launched a worldwide campaign against censorship.
Telling the truth, and dissenting from the official truth, can be hazardous for a documentary filmmaker.
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