From dubbed actors to jarring edits to terrible image quality, watching films on British TV was a minefield in the 80s and 90s…
Saturday the 5th August was a truly magical day on BBC One. Not just because Dale Winton – assisted by the ever-dependable Terry Nutkins – presented a vintage episode of Pets Win Prizes. Or because Tony Robinson presented Stay Tuned!, a thoroughly charming series about the history of animation.
No, the 5th August was particularly memorable because it featured an unusually early screening of shark attack sequel, Jaws The Revenge. Its 6pm air time was so early, in fact, that the BBC wound up cutting out roughly 10 minutes of its gore and toothsome mayhem to keep it friendly for a pre-watershed audience. Never a long film to begin with (roughly an hour and a half), the Jaws sequel which showed that summer evening ran for just 80 minutes.
This was but one of the numerous pitfalls of watching movies on British TV back in the 80s and 90s. There may be nostalgia for the days before Netflix, YouTube and the internet in general. Of the era when families would pore over copies of TV Quick (or if you were posh the Radio Times) to see what was on the box that Christmas.
But when it came to movies on television some 30 or 40 years ago, you could never be quite sure what you were going to get; they were commonly edited for violence or swearing, or simply chopped down to fit a gap in a network schedule. On commercial television, films were liberally peppered with adverts; if you were really unlucky, you’d watch a film for an hour, then have to sit through the News At Ten before you could watch the second half.
If you were an avid movie-watcher around this time, here are some of the things you’d have to contend with:
Glaringly bad dubbing
It’s the 24th December 1988, and the network premiere of the tense thriller, Jagged Edge. Jeff Bridges stars as Jack, a wealthy San Franciscan who may or may not have donned a mask and fatally stabbed his wife; Glenn Close plays the lawyer assigned to defend him. It’s steamy adult stuff, as you’d expect from screenwriter Joe Estzerhas, who went on to really make a name for himself with Basic Instinct – one of the biggest films of 1992.
Despite Jagged Edge’s post-watershed air time, though, the BBC decided to make a number of edits – most glaringly, to Robert Loggia’s private detective, Sam Ransom. In the original cut, he’s quite a sweary character; for the BBC airing, numbers lines of Loggia’s dialogue was looped in by another actor, making Jagged Edge resemble a badly-dubbed Hong Kong martial arts movie in certain key moments.
The BBC wasn’t alone in this habit, either. The early 90s premiere of Aliens had all of its F-words dubbed out, meaning Ripley says to Burke in a key scene, “You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them <voice changes> frigging <voice switches back> each other over for a goddamn percentage.”
Perhaps the most infamous example of a film’s swearing being edited for television, however, was probably RoboCop. As he fruitlessly blasts Peter Weller’s cyborg hero with bullets, a panicked armed robber plaintively asks, “Why me? Why me?” – a more philosophical line than the sweary theatrical cut.
Later on, Kurtwood Smith’s villain Clarence Boddicker bursts into an upscale pad belonging to Joe Morton (Miguel Ferrer) and utters the immortal line, “Ladies leave.” What a polite chap.
Missing in action
While swearing on British television was often a no-no, violence was also toned down in places – occasionally to the point where a film’s entire narrative threatened to break down. The above-mentioned RoboCop, for one, was a far tamer beast on TV than it was in cinemas.
An ITV screening of Richard Donner’s buddy-cop thriller Lethal Weapon in the early 1990s, meanwhile, also had several scenes of gun violence tamed for its post-watershed audience.
What was really jarring, though, was a late scene in which Mel Gibson and Danny Glover’s characters, Riggs and Murtaugh, were captured by the bad guys and tortured. ITV’s censors obviously found these scenes of beating and electrocution a bit much, and so they decided to edit them out. The problem was, the scenes where Riggs manages to escape were also cut right down to the point where the sequence ceased to make any sense.
Even films aimed at younger audiences weren’t immune from harsh editing. The opening of The Goonies was often cut for television, with the precise means of the Fratelli gang’s escape attempt cut down. Given how graphic the offending shot was – Robert Davi’s character essentially fakes an attempt to take his own life – the edit was unsurprising, though it did radically alter the flow of the whole set-piece.
Steven Spielberg’s Temple Of Doom was also cut a fair bit for its Christmas Day 1987 screening on the BBC. According to this website, in fact, the version shown that day ran for roughly 108 minutes – some 10 minutes shorter than the original. Though given how infamously dark that film was, it was perhaps surprising that the Beeb opted to screen it that afternoon at all…
For balance
In fairness, watching movies on TV in the pre-internet era had its upsides. Channel 4 and BBC2 were once far more bold in their film choices back then: the fondly-remembered Moviedrome introduced a stream of cult and genre movies on weekend evenings between 1988 and 2000. Films from the silent era were commonly shown in the afternoon on BBC2, from Buster Keaton comedies to the 2025 adaptation of The Phantom Of The Opera.
Similarly, Channel 4 wasn’t afraid to devote bits of its evening schedule to seasons of Godzilla monster movies or otherwise hard-to-find pieces of world cinema via its Film On Four strand, which ran from 1982 to 1988.
If you knew where to look, then, British TV of the period could provide viewers with a solid grounding in film history. It’s quite a contrast to the 21st century’s streaming giants, which are more intent on offering customers the shiniest items in modern entertainment. (There are a surprising number of early 20th century films on Netflix, though the company doesn’t exactly advertise them – in the UK, the code 31574 will take you to its Classic Films listing.)
Watching films on British TV in the late 20th century was, therefore, a decidedly mixed experience. And we haven’t even mentioned the 4:3 aspect ratios, or what it was like to live in an area with patchy reception, meaning you’d have to watch, say, a heavily-cut version of Die Hard through a haze of static (“Yippee Ki-Yay, Kemosabe”).
The whole phenomenon of edited-for-TV movies was so commonly understood at the time, in fact, that Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse lampooned it in one of their comedy sketches.
“Viewers might like to know that this version has been specially ruined for television…”
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
