PORN: A PERSONAL HISTORY,
& A CONSUMER’S GUIDE
 

‘In Olden Days people spoke of immorality,
all the things they said were wrong, are what I want to be…’

                                            (“Over Under Sideways Down” by The Yardbirds in 1966)

The thing that really sets the innovations agenda is not the technology. It’s human desire. People don’t really care about technology itself. The important thing is, how can it be adapted to the unique and specific requirements of our lives? The end of the 1950s saw a dramatic upsurge in photojournalism. In England, the demise of Hulton’s gravure ‘Picture Post’ photo-magazine, and the rise of a more visually-orientated generation of newspaper picture-editors and graphic-designers, allowed newsprint to seize the initiative, with ‘The Observer’ in the advance guard championing photographers of the calibre of Ian Berry, David Hurn, Roger Mayne, and Don McCullin, who was hired for fifteen guineas a week to record ‘the social scene in Britain’. This was a market-shift that happily coincided with a greater availability of 35mm cameras, with faster, more easily interchangeable lenses. And – although quick to swallow the influences of such French and American innovators as Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eugene Smith, and Doisneau, they were just as keen to exploit the anonymous intimacy those smaller more adaptable cameras encouraged.

And ‘anonymous’ and ‘intimacy’ are the kind of words that readily lend themselves to other photographic and pictorially-orientated genres, those available at certain newsagents, a little more discreetly. In 1954 a Halifax bookshop was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for selling a slim ‘Diana Dors in 3D’ novelty book. Diana, who styled herself ‘the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva,’ was the UK’s answer to Marilyn Monroe. Her film and TV-work, her brief dalliance with music and her stormy private life invited the tabloid press of the day to celebrate her as an all-round ‘bad girl’. She was delighted when the Archbishop of Canterbury called her a ‘wayward hussy’, after all, recommendations of that calibre seldom came better. Her voluptuous cleavage, combined with her engagingly unpretentious personality, ensured that the former Diana ‘Fluck’ enjoyed her reputation as Britain’s number one sex symbol.

Her primary rival in the Pin-Up stakes was Sabrina, who could be glimpsed to advantage in the Arthur Askey TV-series ‘Before Your Very Eyes’ (1955) when she was just eighteen. Better-known as a personality, rather than a fully-fledged star, with gossip-column hints about her shallow vanity, her celebrity was largely founded around her 41-17-36 figure. Surely, they whispered, to have grown such breasts in the first place must be conclusive evidence of premeditated badness. Previously, Stockport-born Norma Ann Sykes had appeared as the Five of Spades in a nude playing card pack, something she later regretted, to the extent of confiscating a pack from out of a store-display and throwing them into the street, an incident that instantly multiplied their collector’s value.

She was renamed ‘Sabrina’ by diminutive comedian Askey. It wasn’t her fault. Askey hadn’t talent-spotted her because of her comedic abilities, but as a visual joke, a running gag about her never speaking. She was smart enough to make the most of her modest talent and ‘dumb blonde’ reputation, but if her impressive natural endowment brought her fame, it was at the price of her becoming a sniggery national joke. She appeared in the usual ‘Spick’ and ‘Span’ girlie-mags – although usually in underwear or cleavage shots rather than topless, as well as on the cover and centrespread of ‘Picture Post’. She could be glimpsed in a handful of movies, including a dialogue-free part as Virginia in ‘Blue Murder At St Trinians’ (1959), after which she made several attempts at transferring her career to Hollywood, where she was snapped cavorting with Johnnie Ray, and where Frank Sinatra claimed he wanted to date her.

But although she quit showbiz in 1967 to marry a wealthy gynaecologist, later reports indicate her Los Angeles dream didn’t work out as well as she might have hoped. Nevertheless, Sabrina falls into a direct line of continuity with later glamour-stars such as Samantha Fox or Abi Titmus, who went on to enjoy comfortable post-notoriety afterlives – the 1950s were a more judgemental less-forgiving time. Diana Dors was built of sterner stuff. She lived her life in the full glare of publicity, before graduating – like Barbara Windsor, into acceptance as a well-loved actress with a talent for comedy well-captured by her central role in TV’s ‘Queenie’s Castle’ sit-com series.

Meanwhile, ‘We want girls on the covers, not covers on the girls’ says Mr Peters, the sleazy newsagent in Michael Powell’s extraordinarily disturbing movie ‘Peeping Tom’ (1960). Here, in the only really essential film he made after his break with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, scripted from a Leo Marks story, Powell creates a creepy psychological chiller that also explores some of the more perverse aspects of moviemaking, and the voyeuristic nature of movie-going itself. Mark is an emotionally disturbed repressed obsessive, with every stilted uptight tick captured by blonde weirdo Carl Boehm in a buff duffle-coat. He’s a focus-puller working on the ‘Chipperfield Studios’ production ‘The Walls Are Closing In’ by day, a soft-porn shutterbug in the evening, ‘well, look who’s here, Cecil Beaton!’ quips one of his models. 

He’s also a sick serial killer who films the dying agonies of his female victims by night. Anna Massey and Moira Shearer play two of the innocents lured into his trap. Later, revisiting the scene of his crime, the killer claims to be snapping for ‘The Observer’. The film opens with a Luis Bunuel-referencing wide-eye close-up. A Soho hooker, seen through a viewfinder, says ‘that’ll be two quid.’ The lens follows her seamed stockings down the narrow Newman Passage, up the stairs. On the bed, as she undresses, her expression turns from bored expectation to shocked horror as he closes in on her… Instantly the sequence is repeated in monochrome as he watches this new ‘snuff’ footage.

With a cool-jazz and Trad soundtrack, its self-referentially filmic nature includes Powell himself as the anti-hero’s manipulative father. Issued the same year as Hitchcock’s masterly ‘Psycho’ (1960), and shot in lurid colour, it was initially reviled as too perverse for audiences to accept. The most controversial picture yet made by a major British director, it was even judged to have temporarily damaged Powell’s status, until critics rightly rescued it, restoring it to its current status as a cult classic. Meanwhile, back in the newsagents, customers pick up under-the-counter envelopes marked ‘Educational Books’ containing nude ‘art studies’. ‘Views for sale’ at five shillings each, or ‘£5 the lot’, sending out instantly decodable signals recognisable to everyone to whom J Arthur Rank had become not only a Film Company but also rhyming slang for a nightly ritual. A scene as compelling, in its own way, as the tale of the young man who films the murders he commits.

Slightly downmarket, screening around the same year, a convincingly chilling pre-‘Steptoe’ Harry H Corbett appears as the psychopathic serial murderer in ‘Cover Girl Killer’ (1959), wearing bottle-top glasses and a badly-fitting toupee to stalk the twilight world of Walton-on-Thames. Written and directed by ‘B’-movie maestro Terry Bishop, the fictional ‘Wow!’ is a monthly one-shilling jazz-mag of ‘lustful images’ that vaguely resembles ‘Parade’. Four of its models are murdered in the order in which they appear on the cover of ‘this filthy magazine,’ including Gloria Starke – ‘the showgirl with the most on show,’ Rona Charles, and ‘Miss Torquay 1959’ Jo Adams. ‘Young’ archaeologist John Mason (Spencer Teakle) has inherited the magazine, a distinction perhaps imposed to distinguish him from the grubby smut-peddler image, and he hangs out around the ‘Kasbah’ club to track the killer. Masquerading in a number of aliases, first as ‘Mr Walter Spendoza’, Corbett rants that ‘sex and horror are the new gods in this polluted world of so-called entertainment,’ as they set a trap for him using June Rawson (Felicity Young) delightfully posed in basque and suspenders.

The contradiction between the girl’s bright gamine innocence and gullibility, and the way her presentation in the magazine is seen by ‘the man’ as corrupting provides something of an authentic reality-fix of the time. Girls are easily lured by the promise of film roles or TV opportunities into posing for him, as he tells Joy ‘I assure you, your nudity means nothing to me,’ before accusing her of being ‘quite happy to exhibit your nakedness before the world on the cover of this filthy magazine.’ In a long tradition of warped clean-up crusaders censoring through murder, the movie retains some sense of relevance.

In the immediate post-war years, sex was still at the amateur-hour cottage-industry stage of evolution. Sydney J Bounds, a much-respected writer with a forty-year career in SF, Westerns, Crime and juvenile fiction to his credit, had a near-brush with its softest of soft-core early manifestations. One that gives clear indications of the way it worked. He visited the Teddington SF Club where he met a writer called Benson Herbert who he’d heard of through stories he’d had published in the pioneering ‘Tales Of Wonder’ pulp-magazine before the war.

‘Benson was a very sharp character. He’d gone to University in his native Tyneside, gained a B.Sc. degree, and moved to London’ Bounds told me. ‘At Utopian Publications he started his photographic business, producing nude ‘art studies’ of young ladies, and selling them – the photographs that is! In order to advertise his photographs for sale, he started a magazine. The actual contents of the magazine didn’t particularly matter! The attitude many publishers had in those days was that they never read what they published. Or at least, I would be very surprised if they did – I certainly never read anything of mine that appeared in his magazines! Benson’s brainchild was what was then known as a ‘spicy’ magazine – nowadays it might be classed as very soft porn. In those days of post-war shortages, publishers were not able to get paper supplies for a new regular magazine, so the way they got around it was to change the title of the magazine with each issue. So one month it might be called ‘Peppy Stories’, the next month ‘Snappy Stories’ and so on. Utopia Press needed a reliable writer to provide their monthly quota of spicy stories. The gentleman who got the job was Norman Wesley Firth, who was known as ‘The Prince of British Pulp Peddlers’. Now, it is a lie – I do know this, that Firth was chained to the wall in the basement of Benson’s house. He had a room in the basement that contained a bed and his wife. He wrote virtually the entire contents of the Utopian magazines, one after the other – until he suddenly went down with TB. This was a very serious disease in those days: there was no known cure. Within a matter of weeks, Firth had died.’

‘Benson had to act quickly to find a replacement. Since I’d done one or two stories for him, he hired me to supply 30,000 words a month. I realised that the income from this writing was more than equivalent to my £6 a week in the factory – so I immediately quit working there! But things were too good to last. Utopia Press were subject to two difficulties. Because of the risqué nature of his operation, Benson was regularly raided by the Police, and subjected to fines of up to £200 a time (a lot of money in the late forties). His second problem was that rival sleazy publishers used to hire professional crooks to burgle his premises and steal his photographs, so they could sell them themselves! The Police – who were not enamoured of his operation, just weren’t interested in apprehending the thieves. Eventually, Benson decided he’d had enough. He moved to Wales and got hold of a printing press, and launched a somewhat different line, publishing poetry by amateur dear old ladies! He was immediately successful, and made a lot of money! However, before he left, he introduced me to yet another publisher of this type of material, and I did a couple of spicy magazines for them, and so I was able to keep going as a freelance writer…’ until other fictional avenues opened up and Sydney Bounds went on to greater things. But his story perfectly illustrates the level the genre functioned on during that long-ago, more innocent period.

Movies initially operated on a similar ground-floor basement level, although oddly independent UK films managed to benefit from a levy designed by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government to promote the industry. Although some of the celluloid results of this innovative initiative could hardly have accorded with the Prime Minister’s intentions. Lacking such financial incentives, in the USA a deviously opportunistic strategy of seizing whatever issues happen to be bothering audiences at the time, then tying them into some shameless morality gimmick, tended to launch-pad the most remunerative examples. ‘Mom And Dad’ (1945) shamelessly conflates the troubling social dilemma of underage pregnancy. Hence this narrative of a young girl’s unwanted pregnancy – by masquerading it as ‘sex hygiene’ education, it legitimises gratuitous screenings of gory venereal disease and close-ups of live births. Cynical hypocrisy for sure, yet it was shown on a near-continuous loop for twenty-three years, endured four-hundred legal challenges, and grossed in excess of $100-million. Its director, Kroger Babb (1906-1980) was a born huckster bragging a carnival background on his CV. To increase the razzmatazz gravitas of this low-brow schlock he insisted on separate screenings for men and women, added the patriotic fillip of a ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ community singalong prior to each showing, then added a po-faced lecture by ‘professor of sex hygiene’ Elliot Forbes. None of which did much to harm the sales of Forbes’ book ‘The Secrets Of Sensible Sex’ which you could buy on the merchandising stand.

There had always been Stag Films, circulated for private screenings in smoky Gentlemen’s Clubs, Barrack room and afterhours sessions at Working Men’s Clubs from the earliest days of film, using cine-projectors and smuggled bulky cans of furtive spools. But the advent of grainy eight-mm and Super-8 films with wobbly fluttering sound, conspired together to accelerate smut’s democratisation into the new decade. It was now possible for amateurs to circumvent the big studio system and produce small-scale films of their own. The American low-fi underground films of George Kucher ranged from 8mm opuses with titles such as ‘Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof’ (1961) to the 16mm ‘Hold Me While I’m Naked’ (1966), featuring Kucher himself as an Indie director with friends and family-members standing in as the cast.

While the outrageously bearded English glamour-photographer Harrison Marks produced ‘The Window Dresser’, a 1961 movie-short done on eight-mm, only to be prosecuted in 1964 by Clarkenwell Court. This four-minute mini-epic, with its camp cameo by Marks himself and a nude Pamela Green contravenes acceptable ‘exploitational-movie’ deviousness by hanging its nudity on a flimsy and amusing plot, rather than hiding it behind the more acceptable documentary-style. Yet it’s far more playful, with a less contrived eroticism than what had gone before, an artefact from the days when Liposuction was still the way you imagined oral sex to be.

George Harrison Marks had started out with the humble ‘Kamera’, a pocket-magazine of ‘photo-stills and art studies’ featuring regular models such as Pamela Green (who cameos as herself in ‘Peeping Tom’), plus ‘Pocket Glamour’ specials featuring Lorraine Burnette or Marie Deveraux. Small enough to be highly concealable, with black-and-white photos on glossy pages, they provide impossible dreams in alluring poses. The profits from such ventures he used in collaboration with Arnold Louis Miller to finance a poor but highly profitable movie ‘Naked As Nature Intended’ (1961). Supposedly investigating the cult of Naturism it opens with that same Pamela Green walking naked across the Cornish beach towards the viewer, artfully flourishing only a towel, as Gerald Holgate’s informative commentary drones on. An early example of horror-maestro Tony Tenser’s movieography, it’s easy to imagine how the transom above the cinema foyer banner-streaming the seductively titled delights to be viewed within, must have made your skull sing at the time. The posters alone now command huge collector’s fees. Folk-Blue guitarist Diz Disley takes the slapstick conductor role in ‘The Chimney Sweeps’ (1963). Inevitably it was followed by ‘The Naked World Of Harrison Marks’ (1965).

Censorship came under the forbidding auspices of the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) operating from its Soho Square address. Set up as early as 1912, ‘for a nosey-parker, it’s an interesting job’ as George Formby observes. Naturally, it still forbade the gratuitous screen portrayal of nudity, yet – of course, this could be circumvented by adopting this contrived cod-documentary pretext. An American movie – ‘Garden Of Eden’ (September 1954), had already become the first mainstream cinema-movie to show a naked breast, even though it was hounded by its detractors all the way to the US Supreme Court, where its supposed ‘naturist documentary’ format eventually vindicated it with a certificate. The New York Court of Appeal lifted a ban imposed upon the film 24 August 1956, opening the door for more nudie-cutie films.

Others, inevitably, follow. Including British Pathé who got in on the act with ‘The Bare Facts’ (1958), filmed at Woburn Park, the Duke of Bedford’s estate. And an early – now lost, Michael Winner black-and-white called ‘Some Like It Cool’ (1962). The location for Winner’s nudie-flick was the Speilplatz naturist sun-club, opened in 1926, hidden from view in Hertfordshire’s leafy lanes – ‘they played a lot of volley-ball’ chortled Winner, ‘because that got the bosoms moving.’ The film was billed ‘The Facts Of Life – In A Nudist Camp’. Frequently filmed in a St Albans nudist camp, such films were all attentively scrutinised by censor John Trevelyn to exorcise any hint of stray pubic hairs. In the opening sequence of ‘Carry On Camping’ (1969), a chortling Sid James and a vacuous Bernard Bresslaw try to interest their reluctant girlfriends in a nudist holiday by taking them to see one of those nudist films. The ‘nudie’ film that Sid and Bernie take Joan (Sims) and Anthea (Meeks) to see is the Charles Saunders-directed ‘Nudist Paradise’ (1959), which – with its inserted scenes, makes Gilly Grant (who was the pin-up star in ‘Parade’ 23 November 1968) the first fully topless female star to feature in the ‘Carry On’ series.

Meanwhile Harrison Marks’ associate Arnold Louis Miller graduated from directing the 27-minute short ‘Nudist Memories’ (March 1961), to become adept as director by assuming a different tack. By adopting a serio-exposé format for his ‘West End Jungle’ (1961, Miracle Films/ Atlantic Pictures, 55-mins). Posing as a pseudo-documentary co-written with Stanley A Long, this ‘Sex-Film That London Banned’ was purportedly ‘A Journey Into The Dark Heart Of London’. Lifting the lid on the twilight world of Soho strip-clubs and prostitution with a socially-concerned slant, Miller insists ‘we were striving for absolute accuracy.’ With Tom Bowman, Andrea Lawrence and Heather Russell, sweetened by the narrator-voice of radio-DJ David Gell, it offered few new insights or solutions to the issue of vice in London, but devotes considerable footage to showing us exactly what that vice is. Teasing the audience with tantalising glimpses of the fleshpots and fleapits. Lurid foyer-posters announced ‘The Girls That Shamed London’ and ‘The Naked Truth About Professional Sex’. And there are elements of truth in its claim to be ‘Made In The Actual Places Of Vice’. The research that ‘the two film-men did before they turned a camera’– as the ‘News Of The World’ gleefully revealed, involved ‘six months in Soho, the clip-joints and strip-clubs, in prostitute’s tatty bedrooms and phoney model’s studios.’

Denied general certification, a loophole allowed ‘Private Members Clubs’ to circumvent the censorship laws and screen ‘adult movies’ (even though they still got raided anyway!) – such venues as Tony Tenser’s ‘Compton Cinema Club’. So Miller’s movie achieved limited distribution, reaching as far north as Leeds! inviting inevitable sequels. Miller, with Tenser listed as executive producer, and retaining David Gell as honeyed voice-over, continued the theme with ‘London In The Raw’ (82-mins, 1965), another supposed documentary revealing ‘The World’s Greatest City Laid Bare, A New Look At The Nice & The Naughty. The Select & the Sleazy. All The Sins. All The Shock. All The Glamour’. When Janie Jones appeared at the August 1964 premiere in a topless dress she created new levels of notoriety. For the Times They Were A-Changing. But maybe for Miller, not noticeably changing that much. By 1966 he was credited as writer-&-director for ‘Secrets Of A Windmill Girl’ (1966), with April Wilding, Harry Fowler, and a young Dana Gillespie, dramatizing Pauline Collins’ dilemma over whether or not to take her top off as part of the Windmill Theatre review. She doesn’t, but the mere suggestion is enough.

In 1964 the original Soho ‘Windmill’ review finally closed, with a rumoured Kray Brothers involvement. Since the 1930s it had been notoriously unique in London for continuously showcasing risqué comedians interspersed with static ‘tableaux vivants’ showing unmoving female nudes recreating inspirational or elevating ‘Works of Art’. With performances famously uninterrupted by Luftwaffe blitzing – ‘WE NEVER CLOSED’ (with performers seldom clothed!), they finally fell foul of the lesser charge of a changing moral climate, although its reputation survived into the Stephen Frears movie ‘Mrs Henderson Presents’ (2005) which celebrates the theatre’s history with the slogan ‘Nudity. Variety. High Society’. According to her explanation in the movie, after the titular Mrs Henderson’s son was killed by poison gas in the First World War trenches she discovered what she called a ‘French postcard’ among his effects. And realised that this back-street postcard was probably the closest he’d ever come to seeing a woman naked. With the outset of a second global conflict she determined that none of the new generation of conscripts would depart for the war zone similarly deprived. So she schemed to stage nude reviews at the ‘Windmill’ as a kind of lively philanthropy. Those who followed her lead had less benevolent motives.

While Soho was going some way to becoming a kind of licensed Red-Light District where goings-on of a dubious nature were starting to happen. An outlaw world of late-night jazz clubs – the ‘Kit-Kat’, ‘Blue Lagoon’ or ‘Bag O’ Nails’ where Tubby Hayes would score his heroin; the ‘Flamingo’ in Wardour Street straddling jazz with R&B; Ronnie Scott’s Club moving from the Gerrard Street ‘old place’ to Frith Street; then, across ‘Sunny’ Goodge Street to the Folk cellars like ‘Les Cousins’ at 52 Greek Street, which was a sweaty beatnik scene where folk sat cross-legged listening to Bert Jansch or Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And soon Paul Raymond was presenting ‘Rip-Off’ at the ‘Windmill’, ‘Pyjama Tops’ at the ‘Whitehall Theatre’, and Fiona Richmond in ‘Let’s Get Laid’, a sex-comedy ‘Live On Stage’ in the West End, with TV’s John Inman in a supporting role.

Born Geoffrey Quinn in 1925 to a Catholic Middle-Class family in Liverpool, ‘Paul Raymond’s absentee father was a Haulage Contractor. Yet he preferred show-business, graduating from early career stabs as a variety drummer and a pier-end mind-reader into promoting ‘Vaudeville Express’, which evolved into ‘Festival Of Nudes’. Following the example of liberated Paris, he found his way around the 1958 ‘on-stage’ obscenity laws which decreed that nudity could be portrayed so long as no movement occurred, by operating as a member-only club, a ‘Revue Bar’. While he maintained a strict nudity, but no-smut no-swearing policy of superficial respectability – ‘an entertainer, not a pornographer’, his example was soon transforming the Soho jungle.

While taking the ‘jungle’ element more literally there were the Italian ‘Mondo’ series of films, launched by ‘Mondo Cane’ (1962) which assumed the montage pseudo-documentary attractions of a moving ‘National Geographic’ magazine issue of shock images. Purporting to show the natives of New Guinea in their natural setting, and the supposed rituals common among such bare-breasted primitives, it nevertheless gets away with screening a woman cheerfully breast-feeding a piglet!

Pushing the envelope of heterosexual tolerance at your local fleapit there was ‘Victim’ (1961), a courageous movie in which successful married Barrister Dirk Bogarde is haunted by his unsettling gay past. When his young former lover (played by Peter McEnery) tries to re-establish contact he refuses to see him. But later, learning of his suicide, he realises that his ex-boyfriend was attempting to tell him he was the victim of blackmailers targeting closet gay men. Bogarde resolves to track down the gang responsible and bring them to justice, knowing that by doing so he’s endangering his apparently contented marriage and his career. He finds ‘FARR IS QUEER’ graffitied over his garage door. His wife Laura (Sylvia Sims) tremulously accuses him ‘you were attracted to that boy as a man would be to a girl.’ He defiantly responds ‘I stopped seeing him because I wanted him, do you understand? Because I wanted him!’

Critic Philip French notes that it’s ‘Bogarde’s agonised embodiment of guilt and probity’ that heightens the film’s continuing vitality. It is the first mainstream film to show a man saying ‘I love you’ to another man. The ex-Ealing Studios team of Basil Dearden and producer Michael Relph responsible already had a track-record of confronting controversial social issues, from juvenile delinquency to racism, but this tense and gripping story – their most influential work, was purposely targeted to unsettle public opinion in favour of homosexual law reform. Aimed at the 1885 Labouchère amendment – the Victorian ‘blackmailer’s charter’ citing ‘gross indecency’, which had imprisoned Oscar Wilde. And for Bogarde, it remains one of the bravest films of his career. He went on to play the melancholy gay lead in the wistfully romantic ‘Death In Venice’ (1971), an exquisitely filmed paean to impossible love filmed against the beautifully diseased backdrop of beach and canals, set to soaring Gustav Mahler orchestration. But although he lived discretely with his long-term partner – Tony Forward, Bogarde was never capable of ‘coming out’ in his lifetime.

Early 1960s Nudie-Cutie films had begun in black-&-white, and only gradually flowered into colour. American titles include Doris Wishman’s smut-classics ‘Diary Of A Nudist’ (1961), ‘Bad Girls Go To Hell’ (1965), and ‘A Taste Of Flesh’ (1967). Her ‘Double Agent 73’ (1974) features the truly breath-taking Chesty Morgan who uses her 73” breasts to suffocate a foe, then photographs him with a mini-cam implanted in her nipple! Doris also gets to direct Chesty in the cult oddity ‘Deadly Weapons’ (1974). Her other regulars include Harry Reems, Barbi Kemp, Davee Decker, and Sharon Kent. Operating under aliases such as ‘Louis Silverman’ or ‘Dawn Whitman’ she became the undisputed queen of Grindhouse, one of the few women to enjoy sexploitation success behind the camera. Maybe her gender helped lower the element of sexual threat in the studio, where male producers considered their ‘starlets’ as an available sexual cookie-jar? She knew what her audience wanted, with an operational complicity working on the principle that men like to ogle, and the girls enjoy being ogled. Perhaps there’s even a degree of truth there, despite subsequent protestations to the contrary. Although the economic inequality of the time must have contributed a further unacknowledged motivation for women to undress for success. Because other avenues were blocked.

Nevertheless, Doris was a truly influential pioneer of tat who knew how to use a good camera angle and achieve a kind of low-budget notoriety of the kind we now associate with Ed Wood with her mind-boggling Sci-Fi extravaganza ‘Nude On The Moon’ (1960). As lip-synching voices proves expensive she devised the strategy of focusing on props or body parts during passages of dialogue. She continued to work in the soft-core genre, through transsexual drama ‘Let Me Die A Woman’ (1978), into the closing years of the century with ‘Bra Bra Blacksheep’ (2000). Elsewhere, through other low-profile directors, there are ‘Girls On The Loose’ (1958), the Shame Sluts of ‘The Wild And The Wicked’ (1954) by veteran Dan Sonney, the Black Satin Jungle inhabited by Bed-Bait waiting in ‘Lessons In Eros, Inc’, then there were the Flesh Harlots known as ‘Four Bitches Called Sin’, and the ‘Cocksure Dame’ of ‘He Kissed Her There’.

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Meanwhile, on the newsagent shelves, before ‘Playboy’ in 1950s America there had been Harrison Publications’ ‘Beauty Parade’, ‘Eyeful’, ‘Titter’, and the misplaced vowel that was ‘Wink’, sub-titled ‘A Whirl Of Girls’. And there was ‘Modern Man’ – ‘The Adult Picture Magazine’ launched in January 1952. But after ‘Playboy’ – came the deluge. ‘Rogue’ was launched in October 1955 by William Hamling – formerly an editor of ‘Imagination’ and ‘Imaginative Tales/ Space Travel’ magazines, a habit he continued by featuring SF in this glossy man’s mag. The trademark licentious cartoon wolf that featured ogling the cover girls on each issue was an obvious bunny-devouring device! Then there was ‘Knight’ – The Magazine For The Adult Male’, ‘Swingle’ – ‘The Magazine For Swinging Singles’. Then ‘Tiger’ – ‘The Book-Magazine for REAL Men’ publishing its eighth edition on Spring 1969. And then there was ‘Escapade’, even ‘Beaver’, and ‘Peach Fuzz Pussies’ magazine. A pornutopia of wank-mags.

In 1965 ‘Penthouse’ began posing and photographing girls ‘as if they were impressionist paintings’ in richly-textured soft-focus, voyeuristically seen ‘as if she doesn’t know she’s being seen’ and – as early as its second year of publication, it featured the first mass-circulation outing for full-frontal pubic hair. For the first time Hefner’s empire found itself wrong-footed, and unsure how to react. Brooklyn-born Sicilian-America Bob Guccione (17 December 1930–20 October 2010), who had once considered taking the priesthood, had been working as a part-time cartoonist, birthday-card illustrator and columnist in London when he launched the magazine. The first issue sold out in days. Next, he gleefully declared, ‘we’re going rabbit-hunting’. Once established he returned to America to direct a US edition as a direct challenge to Hefner’s Bunny-girl empire, calculatedly utilising the secret weapon of breaking the pubic ‘cultural barrier’.

By the late seventies ‘Penthouse’ was out-performing ‘Playboy’ with five-million monthly sales. He even grabbed publicity when the first African-American Miss America – Vanessa L Williams, was stripped of her crown as a result of her nude photos appearing in its pages, albeit old photos that had already been offered to, and turned down by Hefner. According to its own estimation Hefner’s success had never been based around its levels of explicitness, indeed its circulation lead was founded in the supposed life-style sophistication it projected and bestowed upon its readers. And the ‘Playboy’ brand was poised to go mainstream with a string of ‘gentlemen’s clubs, and the bunny-head logo highly visible on keyrings, mugs, designer T-shirts. Rushing into a grubby pubic war of exposure could only damage that image. So Hefner’s response was to buy up a French title – ‘Lui’ published by Daniel Filipacchi, which had been publishing as a Continental rival to ‘Playboy’ ever since its launch issue in January 1964. Hefner switched the title – even the dumbest of his American readership knew that ‘Oui’ invited consent, and installed ex-‘Rolling Stone’ and ‘Village Voice’ journalist Jon Carroll as its first editor. ‘Oui’ (no.1, October 1972) would remain a slightly raunchier part of Hefner’s stable until its June 1981 issue, when its declining circulation led to selling it on to Laurant Publishing, where it survived.

Nevertheless the Guccione threat had unsettled Hefner’s complacent market-lead. He might have run work by Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, he might have created the ‘Omni’ science-mag spinoff, but Guccione calculatedly undercut Hefner by taking ‘Penthouse’ a cut downmarket, making it more racy, trashier and more fun. Where ‘Penthouse’ led, reluctantly ‘Playboy’ was compelled to follow – even if, for the first time ever it was now on the back-foot, forced to go where others had gone first. It may have expanded its franchise by opening its first London ‘Playboy’ Club, but the first glimpse of pubic-fluff did not occur until the August 1969 issue, a tasteful shot of Paula Kelly taken from behind, the pudenda visible only in the mirror she’s preening for. It’s ironic that crossing the pubic barrier was so major a battle, when total shaving now seems to be the preferred option, all the better to gain a clear uninterrupted view of that lower cleavage. Meanwhile, ‘Penthouse’ too, was soon gaining credibility-levels that lesser titles envied, even Professor Stephen Hawking wagered a year’s subscription on the chances of the discovery of a ‘Black Hole’.

There’s a short story – “The Splendid Source”, in the May 1956 ‘Playboy’ issue. It’s a product of Richard Matheson’s prolific pen, the man responsible for ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ (1957) and the thrice-filmed ‘I Am Legend’ (the first in 1964 starring Vincent Price). The story is both a gentle satire on, and an affectionate nod to the burgeoning soft-porn proliferation. Millionaire Talbert Bean III becomes fascinated by the ‘social phenomenon’ of the dirty joke, the off-colour risqué story. Where do they come from? Who writes them?

He decides to trace their origins. After a complex series of investigations his quest leads him to the lavish headquarters of the Secret Brotherhood responsible for writing and disseminating them. Its previous membership has included Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Algernon Swinburne, François Rabelais, Balzac, Shakespeare, Horace, Seneca, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, and further back into time to when dirty jokes were ‘scraped on rocks in many a primordial cave.’ They see themselves ‘as an army of dedicated warriors marching on the strongholds of prudery. Knights Templar with a just and joyous mission.’ Their ‘cause’, it is explained, is that of ‘Love as opposed to Hate. Of Nature, as opposed to the Unnatural. Of Humanity, as opposed to Inhumanity. Of freedom, as opposed to Constraint. Of Health, as opposed to Disease. Yes, Mr Bean, disease. The disease that taints all it touches; turns warmth to chill and joy to guilt and good to bad… the Cause of Life – as opposed to Death!’ It’s a cleverly-constructed comic tale, the message between the lines is nevertheless clear. A little smut is not only good for you, it’s essential for balanced mental health.

Yet the delicate but pressing topic of sexual relief is a long slow tease. And so far it’s largely to do with what Pete & Dud (Cooke and Moore) call the fairer sex’s ‘busty substances’. It’s difficult to recapture the claustrophobic repression of living in that long lost past time. Even viewed from the perspective of the twentieth century’s closing decade, by when it was possible to suggest that ‘the fact is – for this generation, breasts have become almost desexualised. I’m sorry. But it’s true. I mean – they’re major secondary sexual characteristics, so breasts are always going to be focal points of male obsession. But there can be few people around now who have not been on a topless beach. The ‘Page Three’ is pretty much unavoidable. And tits have a high visibility factor most nights on Late-Night TV. Now a nipple is little more than a sneak paparazzi-shot of an unwary celebrity moment, or a clip of the accidental exposure of an over-excited Game-Show winner in a ‘naughty boobs’ out-takes TV compilation.’

So breasts can NEVER be quite so mysteriously elusively desirable as they were to those maturing a generation before, when I was growing up. When we’d eagerly examine the photos in ‘Parade’ or ‘Reveille’ with a magnifying glass, trying to decide if that slight thickening of shadow along the upper line of the swimsuit is REALLY the peeping outer rim of the nipple-areola, or just a shading on the half-tone. It can never be like that again. Not now… Comedian John Cleese operates a perpetual mockery of those stifled repressed British traits, an articulation that achieves apotheosis in ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ (1988) when he protests ‘do you have any idea what it’s like being English, being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing. We are all terrified of embarrassment… that’s why we’re all dead.’

Now it is February 1965. Three successive Wednesdays bring three 32-page issues of ‘Parade’ at one shiny shilling apiece (5p). Its magazine format offers ‘Religious Sect Held Underground Orgies’, ‘Britain Becomes Gamblers Paradise’ (decades before the Lottery), and ‘Illegal Immigrant Racket’ (a kinder anticipation of today’s virulent tabloid Asylum Seeker vilification), ‘Behind The Scenes’ Showbiz gossip, a spice of fiction (‘his great hand whipped out, seized the collar of her dress and ripped it from her shoulders to fall about her feet…’ in Jacques Pendower’s “Snake Bite”), plus an eleven-day ‘Express Coach Costa Brava’ holiday offer for 25 guineas and ‘Modern Family Planning Methods’ in a discrete mail-order booklet. But the real unique selling point is Les Girls, those foxy Babes with curves like a rattlesnake. Pamela ‘Miss Wales’ Conway in a peek-a-boo baby-doll nightie, 36-22-36, Annette Johnson safely knickered but opening her pink-tint negligee invitingly, pouting full-colour Vicki Kennedy ‘whose 41-23-37 shape helps provide her with plenty of work’ (nudge nudge), then the full pert-nipples colour-spread of 37” Kent actress Andi Scott with her lacquered bouffant hair. Just three tiny scraps of material stand between the smiling girls and your gloating lascivious eyes. And where are the ‘Talented Curves’ of green-eyed twenty-year-old Vyvyan Dunbar now? Answers by email please. In the meantime ‘Ferrier’s Funfair’ early mate-trading cartoon carries advance tremors of an even more ‘Permissive Society’ to soon-come. Father returns home unexpectedly to find both his wife and his ultra-nubile daughter in erotic (but as-yet clothed) tangles with two strange men, ‘now Daddy, don’t get sore at Mummy’ daughter reprimands, ‘I had a double-date and she’s just helping me out.’ Oh, that’s alright then.

And the fiction. Some of the stories linger, for no particular reason. The guy lost in the Brazilian rainforest. Details become lost, just the outline remains, and memory of the line-drawn illustration beside the title. Perhaps he’s a crook on the run with stolen artefacts? More likely he’s one of those doubting priests who throw the moral into more starkly delineated relief. He stumbles across a tribe – initially hostile, until the explosion of sunlight on a crucifix awes them. Not with Christian piety, of course, just the shimmering gold of its gilded cruciform. Through its unexpected intervention he becomes, by default, a kind of deity to them, and swiftly takes advantage of their veneration to set himself up as feudal lord, with the right of sexual conquest over their women.

Until – some weeks, or perhaps months later, he reaches for the particularly beautiful nubile so exquisitely illuminated by the artist at the page-head, topless, but chastely veiled by her necklace of shells and bones, her father is moved to resist and makes a hostile advance with his spear. Defensively he reaches for his crucifix to brandish it Van Helsing-style, only in his debauched indulgence he’s neglected to maintain its high-gloss polish, there’s no longer the awe-provoking shimmer of gold. His protection flawed, he’s impaled by the spear. I’ve no idea who wrote it, the issue or year in which it appeared. Or why it stays. It’s a neat moral fantasy with an enticing image at its point of maximum drama. Its eroticism more suggested than explicit. A sketch of the corruption and precarious nature of power, as precise in its humble way as the brutal assassination of Roman Emperors of Robert Graves’ ‘I, Claudius’ trilogy.

But Sexual Liberation is more than just the gradual erosion of censorship. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan should be remembered for his many intellectual attributes. But he won’t. He’ll be remembered as the first man to say ‘fuck’ on British TV – on BBC in November 1965. Actually he had a stammer, he said ‘f-f-f-fuck’. He may have been right about the sort of people who watch late-night satire show ‘BBC3’ when he said ‘I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden’ – but the rest of the country had yet to catch up. It might be true that, for Rock Festivals, in the mud-spattered wake of ‘Woodstock’, nudity is a display of communalism, a defiant rejection of reserve and repressive concepts of imposed modesty. ‘Freedom’. A celebration of the body-electric. The Body Politics of Liberation. The beauty of naturalism, even when it’s not especially beautiful. In the 1980s and 1990s that window effectively closed. Nudity became merely an option, more frequently declined. Or commoditised. When tits are flashed for Blink 102 it’s a debased currency, a ‘Dumb & Dumber’ binge-tease more to do with mooning and nothing to do with ideology.

The art-porn interface also has a long history. Artist Jeff Koons produced a high-gloss flow of explicit work with his porn-star wife La Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) including the ‘Made In Heaven’ series which – ironic, or as a reflection of the banality of consumerism, blur the distinctions between what is and what is not high-brow. Sam Taylor-Wood made her eight-minute directorial porn-debut with explicit footage of a guy masturbating in the Death Valley desert as part of the 2006 ‘Destricted’ film-series. She claimed biblical motivations, a variant on the ‘seed spilled on stony ground’ thing. Well, perhaps.

‘Yourself you touch, but not too much, certain people tell you it’s degrading’ muses the protagonist of Donovan’s perceptive “Young Girl Blues”. It could be convincingly argued that the 1970s was a kind-of late Golden Age for corner-newsagent soft-porn magazines. Top of the food-chain there is ‘Mayfair’ and ‘Men Only’, carnivals of curvaceous cuties matched to captions rich in inventive synonyms for breast, plus fiction, interviews, and features on the lucrative outer margins of taste. Poet and CND-activist Christopher Logue relates how he got six months probation from juvenile court for shoplifting ‘Men Only’ and ‘The Naturist’ from his newsagent (a short step away from later financing his Paris-years literary apprenticeship by writing porn as ‘Count Palmiro Vicarion’).

Slightly below those titles there was ‘Knave’. Then a layer of slightly cheaper candidates jostling for your attention – from ‘Fiesta’ and ‘Escort’, rich colour-spreads of ogre-sized breasts measured out in sticky fingerprints, to ‘Razzle’, which the very wonderful Ian Drury recalled smugly shoplifting in his song “Razzle In My Pocket”. Hey – didn’t we all? Down to the low-rent ‘Whitehouse’ stable. Smaller format variants ranged from ‘Forum’, a serious attempt to explore the wilder shores of sexuality in an informed and liberated way (with contributors including New Labour spin-meister supremo Alastair Campbell in his days as a grammar-school boy porn-fantasist), down to wank-fests like ‘Vibration’. ‘Femmes Fatales and Dirty Bitches, and Daylight Drabs and Nighttime Witches, and Working Girls and Blue Stockings, And Dance-Hall Babes and Body-Poppers, and Waitresses with broken noses, Checkout girls striking poses, and Politicians Garish Wives and Alcoholic Cunts like Knives’ according to the Rolling Stones (“I Go Wild” 1994). You ‘Spank the Monkey’. Or you ‘Choke the Chicken’. You turn the pages faster. Are you coming? Or are you just breathing heavy?

While to exclude the growing Gay magazine market simply because of some chromosomal predisposition on your part seems almost churlishly small-minded. Indeed, Science Fiction superfan Forrest J Ackerman – the man Robert ‘Freddie Kruger’ Englund called ‘the Hugh Hefner of Horror’, once wrote erotic fiction as ‘Laurajean Ermayne’ for under-the-counter Lesbian magazine ‘Vice Versa’. And since its initially subscription-only launch in 1945 – at 35cents an issue, Bob Mizer’s ‘Physique Pictorial’ had been niche-marketing its cheaply-produced issues for a loyal readership. Printed on low-quality paper its spreads of nudie black-and-white butch bikers, wrestling buddies, Red Indians and Sailors form a ready-made spectrum of iconography for a future cast of Village People. In the 1968 Paul Morrissey-Andy Warhol movie ‘Flesh’ hustler Joe Dallesandro and Louis Waldon (as David, the gymnast) peruse a gay pin-up magazine called ‘Vanguard’, Louis reads cut-up lines from its explicit fiction pages, asking ‘how do you like that story?’ ‘OK’ Joe concedes, then more enthusiastically, ‘beautiful’. Well, maybe. Since then things have got a little more loosened up, and gay titles such as ‘Zipper’ are top-shelved at your friendly local news emporium.

Meanwhile, European cinema continued to forge its own path, with French art-house film leading the way. There were two separate strands at work eroding censorship, with contradictory motives, but more conjoined in collusion than was at the time supposed. There was the simple opportunistic Russ Meyer sex-ploitation flick, in which low-budget nudity became its sole unique-selling point. The other faction were the art-experimentalists intent on challenging and dismantling the suffocating establishment of moral repression, conformism and hypocrisy. A crusade using the shock-value of movie nudity to attack social inertia in general, at a time when bodies were scrupulously covered. To them, each grudging concession from the dead hand of the censor is a vindication, advancing the cause for truth, realism, and honesty. Trouble lies in the collision and collusion that occurs when each of their hard-fought battles establishes a legal loop-hole precedent for the gratuitous nudie-flick to take advantage of.

And in truth, the problem is that for those intent merely on glimpses of naked flesh, the motivation of the guy behind the camera is irrelevant anyway. Pretty art-nipples are pretty-much indistinguishable from pretty exploitation nipples. Even if with the former you do get the additional moral kick of political liberation. Ingmar Bergman’s first international movie success – ‘Summer With Monica’ (1951), was screened in sex-theatres across America because it featured an attractively topless Harriet Andersson. It was re-edited and renamed ‘Monica: The Story Of A Bad Girl’, but was still seized by the Los Angeles vice squad and declared indecent. In Bergman’s native Sweden, the black-&-white ‘I Am Curious, Yellow’ (Written and Directed by Vilgot Sjöman – 1967) also mixes radical politics with sexual liberation’s false dreams and deceptive fantasies, screening simulated sex plus political discussion and naked breasts, pubic hair and the first-ever shadowy tree-top copulation. It even screens an attempted castration with scissors.

Vilgot’s book ‘I Was Curious: Diary Of The Making Of A Film’ (Grove Press – 1968) describes how the project was originally conceived as a three-&-a-half hour epic, but was subsequently divided into two, the second instalment ‘I Am Curious, Blue’ following a year later. Yet ‘Jag Är Nyfiken: En Film I Gult’ proved to be a landmark film, a watershed in the emerging Swedish film school that – like the French New Wave, used jump-cuts while dispensing with traditional Hollywood story-structure. It centres around Lena Nyman with her appealing Brian Jones blonde fringe, playing herself. Created under the production auspices of Göran Lindgren using a core-group that included cinematographer Peter Wester, editor Wic Kjellin, and music by Bengt Ernryd, it also features Peter Lindgren, Börje Ahlstedt, Chris Wahlström and Marie Göranzon. Hideously cut for UK screenings, it was denied a license for the US at all on the grounds of pornography. After three court battles the Supreme Court anti-obscenity overturned the law regulating movies, and it was legalised. Eventually, both versions were issued as a single-DVD package with footage approaching its full original length.

It was followed by the even more out-there ‘WR: Mysteries Of The Organism’, a Yugoslavian film based around Wilhelm Reich’s theories, with its sub-text of therapeutic liberation through the orgasmic release of sexual energies. Through frequent and health-enhancing free love. Its plaster-caster sequence screens movie’s first erection.

The 1968 ‘Counter-Culture’ movie ‘You’re A Big Boy Now’ – written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, shows young Bernard Chanticleer, nineteen years and four months old, adrift in New York. He goes into a typical porn-shop. The kind you or I might have wandered into, the kind frequented by the kind of youths who intimately scan the centre-spreads, but can’t quite bring themselves to actually speak to the real girls who live on his block. And he sees the luring spread of magazines we could have seen. ‘Spree’ – a ‘Special Outdoor Issue For The Rugged Man’, ‘Blast’, ‘Misty’ and ‘Tic-Toc’ – featuring ‘The Magic Couch’. There’s also a disparate bunch of men poring over a table of loose photos, mixing and matching according to taste. He picks up a coyly erotic ‘Flicker-Book’ and flickers through the coy striptease it jerkily portrays. Then he visits a coin-operated Private-Fantasy Peep-Show Booth, but the malfunctioning crank mechanism catches his tie as the girl removes her bra with come-on looks… and he is inexorably drawn into her.

Roger Corman’s concurrent cult movie ‘The Trip’ (1967) explains some of the genre’s dubious attraction. ‘It’s very important that every fifteen pages or so, there be a touch of nudity, or the suggestion there-of. It keeps the audience interested.’ His film protagonist notices a psychedelic leaflet announcing ‘TONIGHT YOU ARE INVITED TO A DRUG PARTY’. Simultaneously Michelangelo Antonioni was filming his riveting, surreal, and erotic enigma on ‘Swinging London’ – ‘Blow-Up’ (1969), with David Hemmings giving his most outstanding screen performance as a ruthless baby-faced photographer, shifting from glossy fashion shoots to the Yardbirds live on-stage, to a spontaneously cavorting teenage photo-session taking advantage of two aspirant models… who flash the first-ever on-screen British glimpse of pubic hair. It turns out the girl credited as ‘the blonde’ was Jane Birkin, who would achieve a notable double that same year when her 45rpm single with Serge Gainsbourg – “Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus”, was both banned by BBC-radio, yet rose to the no.1 slot on the Top Forty. Heady times.

For also at the flicks you could be watching the dope-smoking LSD-tripping subcultural sleaze of ‘Easy Rider’ (1969), or Dustin Hoffman’s seduction at the hands of Mrs Robinson in ‘The Graduate’ (1967), or the school matron wandering naked through the school at night in Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant ‘If’ (1968), or Malcolm McDowell rolling naked on the café floor with the waitress. As the radiantly beautiful Grace Slick sings of Jefferson Airplane’s “Wild Tyme” (on the 1967 ‘After Bathing At Baxters’ album), ‘I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet…’ In the preface to his ‘La Philosophie Dans Le Boudoir’ – ‘Aux Libertins’ (1795), the Marquis De Sade had already declared, in a very 1960s way, of a youth ‘for too long restrained by the dangerous fantasies of grotesque and absurd virtue, by the chains of a disgusting religion,’ and urged them to ‘destroy and trample on those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents.’ Right On!

After all, it was a time of obliterating hierarchies, erasing the division between high and low art, blurring previous distinctions between shops and museums with artists installations in department store windows and supermarket products exhibited in galleries, wasn’t it?

Yet more downmarket there was the salaciously cheap ‘B’-movie appeal of ‘Night After Night After Night’ (1969), again travelogueing familiar Soho sleaze as a creepy transvestite judge becomes a serial killer loose in its strip-show subworld. Directed by Lindsay Shonteff from a Dail ‘Beat Girl’ Ambler story, it features Jack May as warped ‘Judge Charles Lomax’, and two attractive strippers in the shapes of April Harlow and Shirley Easton. But more appropriately Ken Russell’s sexually explicit ‘Women In Love’ (1969) ends the 1960s as it had begun, with DH Lawrence prising the limits of what is deemed permissible a little further apart (although there was a time when anyone who professed to be literate had at least read ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, now it is merely the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and not the book itself, that marks an epoch). For suddenly – morality is going into melt-down.

Perhaps it’s something to do with publication of the lushly line-illustrated ‘The Joy Of Sex’ (1972)? Perhaps it’s the moment when the Lord Chamberlain was no longer there to control the content of English Theatre ‘to prevent offence being given,’ leading immediately to that day in July 1970 when Kenneth Tynan’s full-frontal nude revue ‘Oh Calcutta!’ opened at the Round House. Devised by the ‘Observer’s acid-tongued theatre critic, a writer who railed against artistic repression, famed as the first man to say ‘fuck’ in television (and who once allegedly experimentally injected vodka into his anus as part of a desire to ‘go all the way’), it featured John Lennon’s ‘Four In Hand’ masturbation sketch, Joe Orton, and a nude Anthony Booth (who was destined to become PM Tony Blair’s Father-in-law). Meanwhile, Barry (“Eve of Destruction”) McGuire was joining the Broadway cast of hippie musical ‘Hair’ – ‘I did the nude scene because, if we’re created in god’s image, who is saying that the revealing of god’s image is an indecent revelation? How can exposing god’s image be indecent exposure?’ (to ‘Rock ‘n’ Reel no.28’). So I guess that’s alright!

Please do not adjust your trousers…

ANDREW DARLINGTON

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