- 10- The judges in Fellows decided that the Attorney General’s Reference was a direct authority on the issues they were considering under the 1959 Act and that it was also relevant to the construction of the 1978 Act, because the court acknowledged that it was at least doubtful whether in 1959 Parliament envisaged that video-cassettes would become widely available and so provide the means for obscene displays which contravened the Act. Defence counsel in A.G’s Reference contended the court should be slow to apply the words to a piece of electronic equipment which probably had not been within the contemplation of Parliament when the Act was passed. Lawton L.J. said in considering the argument that the court had borne in mind that particular admonition, “but if the clear words of a statute are sufficiently wide to cover the kind of electronic device with which we are concerned in this case, the fact that that particular form of electronic device was not in the contemplation of Parliament in 1958 is an immaterial consideration. In any event in 1959, Parliament would almost certainly have had in mind the fact that electronic equipment for reproducing words and pictures was something likely to come about in the near future. In those circumstances, it is not all that improbable that words were chosen which were wide enough to embrace any developments in the electronic field. But speculation as to what Parliament had in mind and what it probably had not got in mind is neither here or there. It is the duty of this court to consider the wording of the Act and to construe the words in it (if they are words of ordinary English usage,) in the ways in which they would have been understood