Some people have been complaining that the BBFC has not been harsh enough in their 12A rating for The Dark Knight. In order to be able to explain myself properly, there’s a vague chance that I might give a spoiler or two. Frankly though, if you haven’t seen the film already, and you’re that bothered by spoilers, you should probably go and read it instead of sitting indoors in your pants reading my blog. Go on! Shoo! And get me 20 Rothmans while you’re out.

Anyway, apparently the BBFC have received ‘more than 80′ complaints about the violence in the film. So we can be totally clear, I realise that a lot of numbers count as being ‘more than 80′, but I think it seems a reasonable assumption to make that they have received between 80 and 90 complaints, since if it was more than 90, the BBC would have reported this as ‘more than 90′. So, for the purposes of argument, let’s assume they received 89 complaints – the largest possible number.

Alongside this, the BBC report says that 4.7 million tickets have been sold in the UK for The Dark Knight. Now, I think it would be fair to say that at least some of those would be people going to see the film twice. Since I’m feeling particularly generous today, we’ll assume that 4 million unique customers have seen the film. So…

4 million viewers / 89 complaints = 44,944 happy customers for every complaint.

Now that, to me, doesn’t sound like too bad a hit rate. If I worked for the BBFC and 45,000 people thought I’d done a pretty fair job at rating a film before 1 guy turned up and had a problem with it, I’d feel I’d done OK. My aim of protecting little kiddies from seeing things on a big screen that might warp their precious little minds was as complete as it was likely to get.

Assume you were a referee in a football match. The Chelseas were playing The Arsenals at Stamford Bridge. You make a potentially controversial decision and within the capacity crowd one person thinks you got it wrong. The whole of the rest of the stadium were fine with it. But one guy thought you’d got it wrong. I’d be happy with that, wouldn’t you?

The other thing that surprised me about this story was what the whingers had been concentrating on. Keith Vaz, MP, was apparantly concerned about the Joker’s use of a knife in the film. What if that set a bad example? Fair point, one might say. But out of all the things that happen on screen in The Dark Knight a man carrying a knife is really the last of your worries.

For example, here are some other things I think it would be inadvisable for any children who watched The Dark Knight to copy. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but gives you an idea:

• Don’t dress as a bat and fight crime, no matter how traumatic your childhood was
• Don’t drive what is essentially a tank in built-up areas, if you do, stick to the speed limit
• Don’t use the ‘loiter / intimidate’ mode of said tank, thereby firing a missile within a multi-story car park
• Don’t rob a bank, murdering all your accomplices as you go
• Don’t attempt to abduct a potential criminal from a nuclear superpower using a parachute which can be caught by a passing plane
• Don’t blow up two people by surrounding them with barrels of petrol (especially not with fuel prices as they are)
• While we’re at it, probably best not to blow up anything at all using huge quantities of petrol

When it comes down to it, carrying a knife is probably one of the better things a child copying this film might do. At least with knives, distance gives you a little protection. It’s the children wandering around the streets in purple suits and make-up strapped with a collection of grenades with the pins tied together with string that’ll make for the more worrying copycats, you mark my words.