I was asked by the editor of Arena magazine, today, to write fifty words about my first encounter with pornography.
I hope it was for the magazine, but maybe he just gets off on asking people who used to be on TV about their early sexual experiences.
I guess we will only know if the article never appears.
I chose to write about the time that me and my friends first managed to sneak in to see a porn film at the Odeon cinema in Wells, whilst telling our mums and dads that we were going swimming or something.
You might be wondering if we were 28 years old when this happened, but we weren't. We were about 14.
The cinema was showing a double bill of "Kentucky Fried Movie", which is mainly a pretty funny comedy film with a couple of rude bits, and "The Other Cinderella" which was a not very funny, not very pornographic, comedy porn film.
I remember us all trying to assess who was most and least likely to get in, and then gallantly, rather than sending the least likely in first and then all doing something else if he couldn't get in, we let him go last, to ensure he wouldn't spoil it for the rest of us.
I have to say that there is no way that any of us looked anything approaching 18, but all of us apart from the lad on the end (I will not give his name, in case his mum reads this. I don't want to get him into trouble. My mum reads this, so I suspect I will be sent to my room next time I visit home and be made to stay there without any telly to think about what I've done), who was challenged.
All us big men who had got through thanks to our mature looks, defended him in what I remember as being a scene reminiscent of the bit in "Life of Brian" where the women are at the stoning. (High unbroken voices) "Oh, he's eighteen..." (deep manly voices) "Yes, he's eighteen, honest."
The woman at the kiosk, who in hindsight clearly didn't give a flying fuck about the cinema ratings system let Phil Fry through (oops, sorry Phil) and must have been laughing up her sleeve at us. The Odeon at Wells has since closed and I wonder if it was as a direct result of this crime.
I think we were particularly young and innocent fourteen year olds and this was in the days before anyone had a video (though we did subsequently watch loads of X horror and porn films on Betamax round at Phil Fry's house when his mum was out (ooops, sorry Phil). At this point though our only real contact with pornography had been a well-thumbed (though it wasn't the thumbs you should be worried about) copy of Fiesta that someone had brought into school and which we'd taken it in turns to take home.
That's real friendship.
Anyway, even the two sex scenes in "Kentucky Fried Movie" were pretty mind-blowing, but "The Other Cinderella" was in another world. At the time it was harder to imagine anything ruder. In hindsight it was a fairly tedious and unsexy combination of slapstick comedy and girls touching each other's breasts, all based around the story of a traditional fairy tale. It was very tame stuff and I wonder now whether it was created especially for 14 year old boys and given an X certificate, in order to keep them away from the really damaging and scary stuff that goes on in some of the porn films I have subsequently seen.
I don't remember much about it to be honest, except that it took about a week for my erection to go down. And there was one moment during it, when a wag behind us (who was probably also 14) commented upon the breasts of one of the actresses in the film, when he shouted in a broad Somersetshire accent, "Pert Nipples!" He was correct, they were and the whole audience of men (strangely I think it was all males that day, though possibly actually not any men) laughed at his joke.
It became a catchphrase amongst me and my friends for some good time after that. In fact I think if I said it to Phil Fry or any of the others there today (who I won't mention as one of them is now a respected academic) they would still laugh and remember.
Of course such incidents are important milestones on our road to adulthood. Though of course even though we may have felt like men (with aching balls) we were not.
Some of the milestones to adulthood are made of polysterene.
Some years later I told this story to my friend Paul "the Put" Putner (what I love about that nickname is that it is one we never ever call him, but often use in print. That's the best kind of nick-name) at a rehearsal for a play we were doing.
A couple of weeks later he gave me a poster for the double-bill of films that he had found at some record and memorabilia fair.
I framed it and hung it on the wall in my bedroom.
Even polysterene milestones are worth preserving.
