Now what d'ya know? There's a hoo ha over the violence in the new Batman movie.

Parents are apparently crying out for stricter censorship on The Dark Knight, which - violent as it is - is still the most popular film in UK cinemas.

Former Home Office minister Keith Vaz has demanded children under 15 should be barred from screenings of the flick, described hyperbolically as a "symphony of sadism".

Even “quiet man” ex-Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith has added his voice to protests that the 12A rating granted by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC ) was woefully inadequate.

But for all this so-called controversy, just how up in arms is Britain, really? And just how dangerous can a classy fantasy in which a man made up as a Joker takes on a man dressed as a bat be for the 12+ youngsters of this country?

It must be so tempting for politicians and the like to blame all society's woes on arty, fictional portrayals of life - instead of on their own botched attempts at "managing" society. To my mind however, a lot of the more sinister aspects of life come from life itself, not from a bunch of actors playing crazed cartoonish villains.

To put things in perspective, the BBFC - whose 33 anonymous members are being portrayed, by some more paranoid corners of the media, as perverse, hand-wringing villains themselves - has received 80 complaints about the movie so far.

Meanwhile around five million people have seen it over the past fortnight. Surely, as Chief Executive of the Film Distributors' Association Mark Batey points out, there would have been far more complaints and frustration in cinemas, had people been denied access to the movie?

True, at the start of the film, one character is terrorised when a grenade is put into his mouth. Later, a man's eye is indeed jabbed out with a pencil and in another scene, the Joker does boast that he enjoys killing with a knife, because it takes his victims longer to die.

This is - make no mistake – dark and sophisticated material. But disturbing as it is, I refuse to believe it's the sort of thing that leads innocent young children to become disenfranchised, knife-wielding terrorists.

If only it was! But the truth is, of course, more complex than that.

We are a society plagued with fear, even though we ought to know by now that the greatest fear of all is of fear itself. We cannot stand the thought of our children feeling scared and frightened... and yet, feeling scared and frightened is one of the most normal, healthy emotions there is.

Once upon a time, in a society far, far away where CCTV cameras and credit checks and on-the-spot fines for cyclists were non-existent, we were less worried about the concept of violence.

Fairytales were not censored. Though deeply disturbing, they were seen as positive influences on kids. They were read out to those much younger than 12 to help them make sense of all the obscure, unnameable dreads and fears that haunted them in the night.

They were passed down from one generation to the next, like precious stones. Take Snow White, the young maiden who – not even out of her teens - was ordered to be killed by her stepmother, a woman so sick she demanded she receive the girl's heart and lungs as proof that she’d been done in.

I am not aware of it being banned, at the time, for fear of “copycat” killings and the like. Now of course most fairytales are stripped of their more gory scenes and replaced with something less shocking.

It’s the Big Brother style do-gooders of this world who cry out when a film like The Dark Knight is given a 12 rating.

These are the same do-gooders who are up in arms with the number of CCTV cameras around. But with stricter rules on film, come stricter rules on life. We have to choose which way we want it to go.