How absurd to make Mary Poppins a ‘PG’ when so many films in that category are laden with swearing, sex and violence, argues the Mail’s movie critic BRIAN VINER

Dick Van Dyke’s infamous attack on the Cockney accent, considered for years the only shocking element in the beloved 1964 film Mary Poppins, has been eclipsed. Because the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has found something even more offensive than Bert the Chimney Sweep’s dubious vowels.

The BBFC has decided that the Disney classic – one of the most popular and successful children’s films ever made, and which will soon be re-released to mark its 60th anniversary – should shed its long-held ‘U’ rating and be raised to a ‘PG’.

That means our little angels can now sit down to enjoy the adventures of Jane and Michael Banks and their magical nanny, immortally played by Julie Andrews, only under the restrictions of ‘parental supervision’.

The source of the board’s concern is the word ‘Hottentot’. For the BBFC, to quote Mary Poppins herself, the sound of it is ‘something quite horrifying’.

Yet it only shows up twice in the film and goes almost unnoticed. . . That is, until this latest example of ‘woke’ madness, which shines the publicity beam on an archaic expression that the Council would probably rather not hear.

If we didn’t know this before, we now know that Dutch settlers in southern Africa used the word ‘Hottentot’ to refer to a nomadic tribe called the Khoekhoe.

It was used pejoratively, but even in 1964 it was dated, which is precisely the point: the absurd Edwardian naval veteran Admiral Boom (played by Reginald Owen) mistakes sooty-faced chimney sweeps for ‘Hottentots’, merely to illustrate what an idiotic, outrageous old fool he is.

Like the misguided Admiral Boom, the BBFC has chosen the wrong battle. There are strong arguments for changing the classification of certain children’s films, but while the self-righteous players on the board of directors – chaired by former news anchor Natasha Kaplinsky – tiptoe around their own liberal sensibilities, they are missing far sadder examples of what could actually be. scar the young people under 12 years of age.

Take Robert Helpmann’s terrifying Child Catcher in another 1960s children’s classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s a charming movie (in which the great Van Dyke, thankfully, gets to keep his Midwestern accent), but in any case, thinking back to my childhood nightmares about the pointy kidnapper, I wouldn’t quibble if they were given the U rating would increase to PG.

Yet there is a strange anomaly. Images that could frighten children – not to mention scenes of sex, violence, swearing and profanity – do not seem to be nearly as important to the BBFC as the odd word that could be construed as racist.

This is true even if the word’s presence in a script is intended to mock the character speaking it, such as Admiral Boom – just as the befuddled Major in the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers was lampooned as an antediluvian racist.

Among the films with U certificates – in other words, films now considered more suitable for young children than Mary Poppins – are Steven Spielberg’s monumental 1982 hit ET The Extra-Terrestrial and the fourth film in the Star Wars series , Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Ghost Menace (1999).

Yet the latter contains stabbings and beheadings, while ET contains words that could only be quoted with asterisks in a family newspaper, including ‘s***’.

And Elliott (Henry Thomas), the boy who befriends an alien, calls his brother “penis breath,” while his sibling pulls off the inevitable “Uranus” joke.

As a reminder, AU films are considered suitable for viewers aged four and over. The U stands for ‘Universal’.

Another U-rated film is the 2004 Pixar animation The Incredibles. Regardless, it’s great, a dazzlingly entertaining story about a family of superheroes trying to live a quiet life in the suburbs.

But what world is more suitable viewing for little children than Mary Poppins? There is a suicide attempt, references to genocide and numerous images of violence.

In the US the film is rated PG. Here the BBFC is content to let four-year-olds watch it unsupervised. The hypocrisy would be breathtaking if it weren’t so dispiritingly predictable. Censorship is much more tolerant with new releases than with older films, because there is a commercial necessity involved.

So the BBFC routinely goes the opposite way and does not risk the wrath of powerful film companies by awarding a 15 certificate to a film that its distributors believe is a potentially much more lucrative 12A.

Until about a decade ago, 15s were more common than 12As (films designed for those over 12, which can only be viewed by younger children under the supervision of an adult).

But that has changed as the BBFC – weakly hinting at a changing society – has become increasingly accommodating.

While we wait endlessly for the announcement of the new James Bond, consider Daniel Craig as 007 in Specter (2015).

That film contained truly sickening violence: one evil henchman gouges out another’s eyes with his thumbs, and Bond himself is tortured with a robotic drill. But it was a 12A. In adult company, a six-year-old could have gone to the cinema to see it.

All we ask is consistency. There is no reason why the BBFC shouldn’t scrutinize the long-standing certificates of children’s films, as they have done with Mary Poppins, but why should a perceived (and somewhat dubious) case of racism be considered more dangerous or harmful than explicit violence?

Twenty years after my friends and I were stunned by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher, a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) – Robert Zemeckis’ successful blend of live-action and animation – did the same to the next generation.

When Christopher Lloyd’s evil Judge Doom killed an anthropomorphic cartoon shoe by dropping it screaming into a vat of acid, children everywhere were traumatized.

Today, I have no doubt that their children would be, too. Still, the film has retained its PG rating. This also applies to the Oscar-winning film Kramer vs Kramer, which is disturbing in a completely different way.

In the 1979 legal drama, Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman play a couple going through a bitter divorce and custody case, and its devastating impact on their young son can be very disturbing for children, especially those who have gone through similar experiences.

I have a divorced friend whose vulnerable teenage daughter came across it on television a few years ago and was so upset she needed help. But Kramer vs Kramer remains a PG – in the same category as Mary Poppins.

Other PGs include Grease (1978), with all the implied sex, teen pregnancy and strong innuendo, and the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy Sleeper, with a machine called an “orgasmatron.”

As for the ‘Hottentot’ furor, racism is of course a scourge on society and inflammatory language on screen must be carefully controlled.

While I generally disapprove of retroactive application of contemporary sensibilities, I can understand why the N-word (the name RAF hero Guy Gibson gave to his black Labrador, who died in a road accident on the day Gibson led the ‘bouncing bomb’ attack)) is carefully pieced together from the 1955 epic The Dam Busters.

But common sense must be applied. It is inflammatory in itself to change the rating of a film based on a word that is not used in modern parlance and has no meaning to today’s children.

It exposes the BBFC to the accusation of being as hopelessly out of touch with reality as crazy old Admiral Boom of Cherry Tree Lane.