[James2001]

That being said... the BBFC seems to suggest "Children’s content should be set within a positive framework - there may be very mild bad language, occasional nudity and very mild violence" on a U rating. Which to my mind sort of defeats the point of a U to a large extent. Yes it'll never be squeaky clean (I mean Watership Down used to be a U for goodness sake and remained that way for decades even though there are scenes of rabbits killing each other) but it should be mostly safe.

To be fair, the BBFC's website does explicitly state that not all U rated content is aimed at children. I can think of quite a fair amount of stuff in my own DVD collection that very much fits into that- even more so when the BBFC website breaks the ratings down into individual episodes (so you often find a PG or 12 rated boxset has a lot of U rated episodes- in a couple of cases there's only 1 or 2 PG or 12 rated episodes, or even only the special features, pushing the overall rating up)- so around a sixth of the episodes of Cheers are U rated, and it's fair to say nobody would say that's aimed at kids. One of the more suprising ones Patterns of Force from the original Star Trek which is the one with the space nazis, especially as it has a scene where Kirk and Spock are being whipped with visible marks on them from it (and that was given said U rating in 2004!).

Though I guess it's possible the ratings would be different if they were classified now with tighter criteria for the U and PG ratings in recent years- especially when we're in a situation where Mary Poppins is now PG and Casper is 12, both for what seem like strangely minor reasons.

There was publicity last year about Watership Down now being PG, and 3 of the 4 previously U rated Star Wars films are now PG (only A New Hope still has a U rating, though that may only be because it hasn't been recently resubmitted, unlike the other three), I certainly do wonder why they weren't PG all along really, but I guess we could all argue forever on ratings we don't agree with.