UK- ANOTHER week, another porn season on Channel 4. Surely it's only a matter of time before they do The 100 Greatest Adult Entertainment Moments, featuring Stuart Maconie fondly reminiscing over his first experience of watching Electric Blue on Betamax whilst growing up in Rochdale.
Last week's selection of programmes, though, was supposed to explore the dark side of porn - as opposed to the sunny, happy-go-lucky side of prostituting your body so strangers can get their kicks. It's almost timely, I suppose, considering the slow creep of explicit pornography into mainstream culture.
American films of the 1970s, such as Debbie Does Dallas http://adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=6807 and Deep Throat, have been successfully repositioned as nostalgic "classics"; the fashion and moustaches amusing enough to insulate the explicit and degrading acts with irony. Deep Throat, xxx.deepthroat.com has already been the subject of a feature-length documentary (produced by Ron Howard) exploring the tragic life of its troubled star Linda Lovelace; Debbie Does Dallas Uncovered attempted the same trick, albeit on a smaller scale and with only modest success.
According to the reedy voiceover of the (male) film-maker, the challenge was to track down all of the main players involved in the 1972 movie, the flimsy plot of which saw young cheerleaders offering sexual favours to raise enough cash to get Debbie - played by fresh-faced newcomer Bambi Woods - to Dallas to try out for the cheerleading big league. However, not everyone was happy to be found.
The producer/ director "Jim Clark", now a successful businessman, would only talk if his real name wasn't revealed. Of those who had performed in front of the camera, only one of the female participants agreed to be interviewed; another cheerleader flatly refused to reminisce on "a career that gave me nothing but exploitation". The ghost of Woods haunted the whole documentary - she left the adult entertainment industry soon after her debut film was released and promptly vanished.
What we were left with, then, was the male stars, one of whom likened performing sexual intercourse in front of a camera to "stuntwork". In a rather creepy touch, these ageing lotharios were encouraged to commentate whilst watching Debbie Does Dallas on DVD, though there was something melancholic (and, I suppose, fittingly voyeuristic) about watching these guys watch their younger selves hump away.
"We're the poorest famous people in the world," noted one stud, bitterly. Another reckoned they'd made $200 a day working on the film, which went on to be one of the top five highest-grossing porn flicks in history. If the men felt they were treated shoddily, one shudders to think of the treatment meted out to the women.
Unable to either produce an ageing Woods, or even confirm rumours that she'd died of a drug overdose in 1986, the documentary never seemed to really get to the heart of its subject, and was happy enough to meander around the sometimes titillating, sometimes tragic fringes. But if it lured in a few readers of garish lad mags such as Nuts or Zoo, with the promise of cheerleader nudity, then made them consider the human cost of porn, it did some small good.
