Porn in the UK before it got legal - remember?

[calufrax]

soho.
back in the late 1980s early 90s they used to turn magazines inside out in the bags (half the pages missing ) but in the bar next door they would charge you £80 for a drink and beat the living shite out of you if you didn't pay, (so i have heard) that and being aproached by the scam artist prossies. (if you ever went down there at the time you will know the black one i have in mind) if it wasn't for the las vegas amusemant arcade around the corner with street fighter 2 machines the entire area would have been a no go area for me. nasty place, but so intrigueing . early 1980s all the CID were on the payroll of the porn guys. if you ever get to see the documentary about police corruption late 1970s have a look , also one about paul raymond.

really pleased when hardcore went legit.

[broxyman]

Originally Posted by Mr.Bungle

They might not of seen any hardcore before, but surely they were familiar with tissues?

These places were really rough then. They were showing illegal loops, bribing the police to leave them alone, and any customer service issues were dealt with by beating up the customer. Tissues were never provided, and that relied on the customer having some with him - unlikely in those days.

It's difficult for anyone these days to imagine just how bad things were in the UK then, pornwise. Politicians were scared stiff of a public backlash if they changed the law (newspapers like the Mail and the Express would have guaranteed that) and most people were quite happy with the status quo. Only seekers of hardcore pornography (a very small percentage of people in the UK at the time) wanted a change in the law.

What really changed things was the internet and increasing travel abroad. The floodgates started to open, and there was no stopping it. We still have the same ridiculous attitude to prostitution - it goes on, as it always will, but we criminalise the girls who do it. Prostitution itself is legal, but most of the ways of doing it safely are criminalised.

The UK is still a country of double standards. Sex seems still to have some kind of guilt thing attached to it.

[isambard1803]

Thebadguy wrote:
"Yeh and the coppers used to take anything they confescated home or share em out amongst themselves!"

Hmm, I even remember the days when I was a member of an organization for young business and professional men - think of an item of dining room furniture with no corners :-) - and the entertainment at one meeting was a number of films confiscated by the local OP squad, arranged by the good offices of a member who was a copper.

[andysmz]

Originally Posted by Albert Mudat

being on the other side of the Channel your stories gave me shivers (really). Quite ironic to think that a female P.M. could let a man starve to death (Bobby Sands) and be offended by a hard dick or Benny Hill's angels on TV.
Double standards of obscenity imho!
Human nature...

Perhaps it would be appropriate for you to keep your political views to yourself - before someone finds the need to comment on the degree of collaboration that occurred in occupied Europe during WW2.

[Aluk]

I remember going into Soho in the early eighties not to buy magazines but for the peep shows, i think it was about 50p in the slot for half a minute or less. I did go a few times, some of them were very good like a couple of good looking chicks nude and sitting on stools spreading themselves. Some were just very slow stripping acts, not very good.

The only time i did buy any hardcore mags was much later in the late 90's, this was down Brighton, i did buy a under the counter hardcore video tape as well, the mags were ok but after a train journey home ready to enjoy the video it turned out to be a load of crap, just a load of softcore and the tape was very poor quality, well ripped off.

[calufrax]

i went into one of those peep show booths in the early 1990s and was genuinely surprised to see it was a real girl. i had heard it was pictures stuck on a wall. that cost a quid back then.

[AlanF]

Me and a friend went to see a 'Live Bed Show' in Soho in 1983 and paid about £5.00 each, which was quite a lot back then, we sat down and the shutters went up revealing a middle aged bored looking woman laying on a single bed doing her knitting......THAT was the show!! We got the obligitory black heavyweight looking boxer to enquire 'if everything was okay?' knowing fine well we were lying through our teeth by saying everything was fine.

[Aluk]

Originally Posted by AlanF

Me and a friend went to see a 'Live Bed Show' in Soho in 1983 and paid about £5.00 each, which was quite a lot back then, we sat down and the shutters went up revealing a middle aged bored looking woman laying on a single bed doing her knitting......THAT was the show!! We got the obligitory black heavyweight looking boxer to enquire 'if everything was okay?' knowing fine well we were lying through our teeth by saying everything was fine.

Sorry but that is so funny, but this reminded me i did go to a strip show in Soho once, it was ok apart from the music and the rustling of newspapers.

[andysmz]

For anybody interested there was a very good book entitled "The Pornbrokers" dealing with Soho etc from the 50s to the early 80s including the antics of the corrupt 60s/70s Obscene Publications Squad (Wally Virgo et al) and those who made contributions to their wellbeing.

There was genuine hard core cinema in London (and elsewhere) starting from the 60s with the likes of the Taboo Cinema Club showing stuff like John Lindsay's 8mm shorts. Sadly I was too young for that era but certainly there was still a variety of hardcore porn cinemas in Soho in the early 80s if you looked around. Cinemas like the Astral were unreliable as you never knew whether you would be lucky and get hardcore or just the normal X rated rubbish you could watch at your local Classic. Basically the rule seemed to be that the more obvious the cinema or shop, the less likely you were to get (in)decent porn. The main Soho thoroughfares were basically after the punters who were just passing through and weren't really looking for repeat custom - hence you were pretty much guaranteed to be ripped off. Prime example was the Moulin in Windmill Street which managed to have the longest film run in the world with the decidedly unpornographic "Come Play with Me" and some very misleading publicity.

Mags were always a bigger risk because of the fact they knew you wouldn't be opening the shrink wrapping until you were well away from the shop. Again, people like Sullivan ( Birmingham City, Private Shops, Sunday Sport) took advantage of this by basically copying the covers of continental mags like C*l*r Cl*m*x and Pr*v*te and filling the insides with crap.

Interestingly videos in the 90s were far less likely to be a rip off, possibly because if you were going to copy anything, it might as well be what it was supposed to be. It tended to be better outside Soho as most of the grubby little backstreet shops would have a fair amount of repeat business whereas the Soho shops would be happy to sell you a blank tape - particularly if you were foreign looking or sounding.

[broxyman]

Originally Posted by andysmz

For anybody interested there was a very good book entitled "The Pornbrokers" dealing with Soho etc from the 50s to the early 80s including the antics of the corrupt 60s/70s Obscene Publications Squad (Wally Virgo et al) and those who made contributions to their wellbeing.

There was genuine hard core cinema in London (and elsewhere) starting from the 60s with the likes of the Taboo Cinema Club showing stuff like John Lindsay's 8mm shorts. Sadly I was too young for that era but certainly there was still a variety of hardcore porn cinemas in Soho in the early 80s if you looked around. Cinemas like the Astral were unreliable as you never knew whether you would be lucky and get hardcore or just the normal X rated rubbish you could watch at your local Classic. Basically the rule seemed to be that the more obvious the cinema or shop, the less likely you were to get (in)decent porn. The main Soho thoroughfares were basically after the punters who were just passing through and weren't really looking for repeat custom - hence you were pretty much guaranteed to be ripped off. Prime example was the Moulin in Windmill Street which managed to have the longest film run in the world with the decidedly unpornographic "Come Play with Me" and some very misleading publicity.

Mags were always a bigger risk because of the fact they knew you wouldn't be opening the shrink wrapping until you were well away from the shop. Again, people like Sullivan ( Birmingham City, Private Shops, Sunday Sport) took advantage of this by basically copying the covers of continental mags like C*l*r Cl*m*x and Pr*v*te and filling the insides with crap.

Interestingly videos in the 90s were far less likely to be a rip off, possibly because if you were going to copy anything, it might as well be what it was supposed to be. It tended to be better outside Soho as most of the grubby little backstreet shops would have a fair amount of repeat business whereas the Soho shops would be happy to sell you a blank tape - particularly if you were foreign looking or sounding.

My experience of the Soho shops was pretty good, by and large. The 'reputable' ones used to have video players and TVs, and they'd play the start of any tape you were interested in buying to prove it was the real thing. The rip-off merchants had no TVs, and would tell you they wouldn't run the risk of having one because of the large fines if they were caught playing the videos. The tapes these merchants sold tended to be blank ones.

There were shops just selling videos, and these tended to have an outwardly respectable ground floor selling bog-standard videos (which nobody ever bought) and a basement where all the porn was sold. £20 was the going rate, with half back on exchange. People used to copy the tapes, which were copies anyway, keep the 'original', and take the copy back. With the result that in some shops which didn't mark the 'originals' so they could recognise them, the tapes got to be of poorer and poorer quality as time went by.