Porn in the UK before it got legal - remember?

[billybunter]

Porn shops were taboo in Belfast, still are, religious nutters would campaign outside as I went in to browse the racks. The prices were OTT but beggars can't be choosers.
I went to a Sport sex show one time to see Shanine Linton strut her stuff. All the 90's DS models were there. That's my journey.

[pharoahegypt]

^^^
The appeal of Shanine always passed me by.... Not sure why?

Adding another tale from back in the heyday of the late 90's; a friend of mine who lived in Gloucester was on good terms with the guy who actually ran one of those shops near the cattle market in Gloucester; and told me he'd met a lot of the DS girls there; some who were quite accommodating, and others who clearly did not want to be there, much less pose for 'tacky' pix with their fans.... The very same ones who afforded them a career of course.

The one thing I learnt about models during those few years has always stuck with me, and rung true since..... You have girls who model because they enjoy the job, the money, and like to be complimented by their fans; albeit often the dirty raincoat brigade... And you have the polar opposite; who hate the job, resent the fact some guy might deem to comment on her body or pictures, and is only in the business for the money, and in the hope that she will sooner rather than later attract a wealthy hubby who will whisk her out of the business and into a life of luxury....

I could name names both sides of this conclusion.... but I won't... Forum rules forbid me. (lol)

[Theotherstig]

Brilliant thread!

Brought up in the UK on a diet of Benny Hill, Hot Gossip and Page 3s I had, like every other 70s kid, built up a very poor stash of fairly crap porn (best ones of course found in hedgerows).
Eventually I went down south to university and I could not only buy a few mags myself (it was the heady days of Whitehouse, which actually showed open-vag shots under carefully controlled conditions), but also drive on to London.

I remember seeing an article in a copy of Mayfair or something about the Taboo Cinema near Leicester Square actually showing hardcore films and thought I've got to get into that (remember: in 1978 there was nothing like that in the UK).
In those days you could park somewhere near Cambridge Circus and then just walk over to the place. It did cost GBP 25.00 each time to become a "member", but it opened up the whole world of John Lindsay and C*C loops, and full-feature Magma or Dorcel films (separate rooms for short and long features).
All the descriptions of scary Soho bouncers/bars/prozzies ring true, but I managed to avoid any problems.

As it happens, the last time I went was when I was driving down to Dover to start my year abroad in France in 1980 as a language student. I remember taking in the excellent loop "Fuck My Arse" and another US one where a milf gets a boyscout to take a pile of mags away for bob-a-job - they turn out to be porn mags and he gives her a good seeing-to on the table - anyone know the title???

Imagine my surprise when I got to live in France and saw that virtually every corner newspaper shop was selling Dorcel romans-photo (large mags with porn stories and stills from porn films on opposite pages), C*C mags (sometimes pirated but always complete) and a whole host of other French porn mags and VHS cassettes. ALL hardcore!

I actually stayed in Europe and forgot all about UK porn laws in the 80s.

The only other funny clash-of-porn-cultures was when I was working in Athens (1986), and I saw that they had out-of-town "drive-in cinemas". After years of seeing them in US films I innocently thought I had to give that a go!
I said as much to my Greek friends, but they didn't really react much. Not surprising really. I realised when I went that they only show porn... Mind you, if you've never seen an anal cumshot covering the width of a Greek hillside it's worth the experience!

And still... after all that, and all the developments in technology, I had to go to work in London for a few days in 1998 and discovered that they were still doing coin-slot peep shows of bored models in Soho! It brought it all back - for a quid she stuck a dildo in for about 50 secs, and heavies were in attendance if you were thinking of complaining...

Astonishing how a distance of a few hundreds miles can affect your whole sex-life!

Any impact on how you'll vote in the EU referendum?

[VintageWomble]

Bloody hell, all this talk about the "old days".. sigh...

I guess I'll chip in as well...

Back in 1997, or thereabouts, I remember buying for £15 an envelope filled with about a 100 various lesbian pics covering a period from the mid 60's to the early 90's. No idea how the bloke got them, but I'll always remember fondly that one photo of a 60's chick getting fisted up to the elbow, and she's just grinning at the camera, legs apart, everything visible and all! Sadly though, it got lost due to various moves, etc (though I'm half convinced my gal of that time found them and burned them...)

But I found one photo of that series a few years ago, and since then, It's become my quest if you will to find most of those pics, if not all. Here's the one I found. Fancy helping?
(And if memory serves me right, it was the slimmer one on the left getting fisted, best wanks ever)

[broxyman]

I suppose to be fair we shouldn't forget the legendary John Lindsay:

http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/t33...ps-thread.html

Almost alone, apart from the inevitable small-scale back street hardcore merchants, he produced hardcore pornography aimed fairly and squarely at the British market, catering for typically British obsessions with titles like 'Jolly Hockey Sticks', 'Schoolgirl Seduction' and 'End of Term'.

There was a shop/cinema in Soho showing the films and selling videos - around £25 each back in the early 80s as I recall. No proper soundtrack (there was a sort of dubbed track added with appropriate sex noises!) but reasonably well made - and in colour. Not remotely on a par with CCC, but they were made in the 70s, and for Britain this stuff was really hot! It never really became mainstream because the Scandinavian and German stuff swamped it, but it does have a particular niche in the history of British porn.

They were also amongst the earliest hardcore films reasonably easily obtainable in the UK, and I suspect quite a few men will have strong masturbatory memories linked to these films.

[MrStockings]

Back in the early 1990's I lived in Bristol and had started ordering videos from Yourchoice and Tabor. Basically they had the original master copies in the UK, you send off your order by post to Holland, and then the video came back posted from within the UK. They must have had a number of copying stations or sent them out from across the UK as they always turned up with a different postmark. Anyway, they got raided - this would have been around 1992-3. There must have been a site in Bristol as the local news showed bags of videos being loaded into police vans. Yourchoice were up and running pretty fast again afterwards, but none of my orders ever turned up after that, and when I sent a letter to Holland complaining about non-delivery, the reply I got (with a refund!) that came back from Holland had been opened by customs, so I can only assume that my mail was being intercepted.

[VintageWomble]

Originally Posted by MrStockings

so I can only assume that my mail was being intercepted.

Bloody hell, disgusting that is, not letting a man have a nice quiet time for himself...

when I got my envelope of hardcore lesbian porn, I turned the corner and almost bumped into pair of bobbies on the beat. My heart was beating like a jackhammer...

Shame that the customs officer wasn't understanding...

[Grouchy]

Back in the early seventies I met a chap (through a mutual friend) who was one of the foremost importers of porn into the north of the UK. This stuff used to come in on ships into a northern port and he handled the distribution out to shops and "gentlemens emporiums" etc.. It was mainly CC and R*d*x stuff, both mags and 8mm films (remember them?).

I had a big van at the time and was rapidly recruited to the distribution network. I must have carted tons of the stuff across most of the north of England. It got to the point where porn actually got boring (no pun intended) as I saw so much of the stuff.
Don't know how I would have explained the contents of the back if I had got stopped by the police...

I don't think "It's purely for personal use officer" would have held much sway!

[Steelyman]

Remember when they used to cover up penetration shots etc in mags with black dots? I remember buying one mag where they had used some kind of marker pen to hide a penetration close-up, I found that the application of a little nail varnish remover was very effective at removing the offending dots!
Strangely it was sometimes more of a turn-on to imagine what was under the blanked out areas than to see it!

[pharoahegypt]

Back when I was running adult shops in the late 1990's we had this mad Dutchman who used to turn up in this camper van, and sell us the real McCoy scan mags out the back. He used to just drive on a ferry in Holland, get off in Harwich or some less obvious port like that, and drive all over England selling them out his van. So blatant it was likely the best cover anyone could have. He had them stashed inside cupboards, under bedding, inside his fridge, anywhere he could put them where they didn't stand out.

The dots were usually due to them being reprinted here in the uk; while sometimes we had to use stickers to cover up anal pen shots, or blowjobs on the covers, to save the fuzz going off their heads at us. the less we antagonised them the less we got raided; though you couldn't tell some other fellow porn shops, who were happy to show it all and take the hits; until everyone started to get locked up instead of just fines; then it changed dramatically.....