When VHS Became a Refuge from Violence

During the 1970s and 1980s, as the conflict known as the Troubles intensified in Northern Ireland, the arrival of home video transformed the way people watched films. Writing in MUBI Notebook, Sam Manning explains how bombings, attacks on cinemas, nightly curfews, and a wider atmosphere of insecurity made moviegoing less of a social habit and more of a potential risk. VHS offered audiences a way to watch films in the relative safety of their homes, and people bought the machines despite widespread unemployment: in 1980 a Philips VCR cost 495 pounds, when the average weekly household income was 119. By 1983 Northern Ireland reportedly had a higher concentration of VCRs than any other part of the United Kingdom. The video boom, however, quickly created a parallel underground economy. Rental shops flourished while pirated films circulated widely, sometimes months before their official theatrical release. Movies such as Saturday Night Fever and E.T. were copied and distributed illegally, and a single police raid in 1983 seized some 35,000 tapes. Contemporary reports also alleged that paramilitary organizations on both sides were profiting from video piracy; one 1990 report estimated the IRA's income from it at nearly a million pounds a year. Manning's history shows that VHS in Northern Ireland was more than a technological chapter in film culture. It offered people an escape from violence while becoming entangled in the economy created by that same conflict. Multiplexes, DVDs, and eventually streaming brought the videotape era to an end, but the relationship between home entertainment, piracy, and new technology has continued in different forms.

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