This entry contains AIOTM
spoilers. You might want to listen to episode 4 before you read it.
I spent most of the day regretting last week's AIOTM Moral Maze. The audience, as you might recall, had decided I had been immoral by leaving porn in a bin (even though that was clearly moral) and I was to be punished by having to buy a porn mag, masturbate over every page and then give the soiled article to a 14-17 year old boy in the audience. Whilst the podcast Richard Herring might conceivably do such a thing, the real me almost certainly wouldn't, but I had a plan.
It did still mean I had to go and buy a pornographic magazine, which is something I think I have maybe done once in my life when I was about 18 (whatever other porn I saw back then was found under bushes in the woods). I was embarrassed to be doing such a thing and even though I felt I would be judged by the person I bought it from, what I was going to do with it was probably worse than what they were thinking.
I decided that it might be less embarrassing to buy the mag from WH Smiths than a corner shop - somehow it would be harder to look an honest shopkeeper in the eye than a till monkey and I could at least purchase some newspapers at the same time and hide my shame from everyone. There was the chance more people would spot me I suppose, but as I was about to discuss the purchase on a podcast downloaded by thousands that seemed irrelevant.
But unbelievably, as far as I could see anyway, Smiths no longer stocks porn mags. The hypocrites are happy to sell Nuts and Zoo but no proper honest soft porn. I don't know if that is from a sense of moral superiority or because no one in their right mind buys magazine porn any more, when the internet exists to cater to your every specific perverted need. But whatever the case I was going to have to go to a cornershop. I just hoped it wouldn't be a woman at the till.
It was a woman at the till. A middle-aged Indian woman in a sari. Which somehow made it more appalling. But I didn't have time to shop around. I had a show to write and a lot of masturbating to do.
There were only a few porn mags up on a high shelf, high up enough for a short man like myself to have to reach up quite high. I had wanted to get a Fiesta as that had been the first porn mag I had seen, but they didn't have one (maybe it doesn't exist any more). Just as I was about to reach up another customer arrived and stood right beside me. I had to abort the mission for a moment at least. He seemed to be staring up at the top shelf too, which seemed a weird coincidence. He didn't seem as shame filled as me though and reached up, brazenly. What a pervert. He almost certainly wasn't doing this because he'd been forced to by a podcast audience. But he reached up higher than the magazines (he was a tall man) to a shelf I hadn't even spotted, that had kitchen towels on it. Perhaps it was there as an impulse buy for the casual masturbator. Maybe he'd lost nerve at the last second, but he happily left to purchase his towels. I waited til he was round the corner, grabbed a copy of Hustler, checked how much it cost (£4.99 including a DVD), got out my money and made for the counter.
I hoped to get the transaction over with quickly, but as I shame-facedly put the magazine on the counter, the DVD slipped down inside the polythene cover and went over the price. The woman, already looking judgemental and sad, was forced to move the DVD aside whilst I mumbled about it being £4.99. I put down the money and left, too ashamed to take my change. This was YOUR fault that I had put myself and a stranger through this awkwardness. And the fact that she sell the magazines in her shop doesn't make it any less worse. She might have no choice. She surely didn't like what she was doing or what she was selling. Just awful.
But not as bad as what I had to do later.
I decided that masturbation was not an ethical or realistic option (the magazine had a lot of pages) and so instead I mixed up some flour and water in a bowl and then fastidiously coated every inch of the mag with the fluid in the kitchen sink. In many ways what I was doing felt worse and more disrespectful to the women in the magazine and women not in the magazine and all of humanity than actually smearing it with my man porridge. I thought about what an odd job I had. It had led me to spending a good 20 minutes of my life spreading counterfeit semen over pictures of naked ladies. And also non-pornographic pages. The worst bit was having to smear floury gloop over an article about the late actor Diana Dors. I wondered if this might have been the worst thing I had done in the name of comedy. It made me laugh hysterically, but also feel deep shame and humiliation. Which might make it close to being great art. But great art and awful shit are often separated by a hair's breadth.
Ironically enough all of this made writing this week's AIOTM somewhat easier than usual. This was going to be enough to fill almost the entire 60-70 minutes. Unusually I didn't have a gig tonight or anything else to occupy me, so after watching Home Alone II (this week's National Lampoon's European Vacation) I got on with it and had over half the script complete by 11pm when my girlfriend got back from the gig she'd been doing.
I think that I am sane, but sometimes the things that I do are only distinguishable from madness because I turn them into (some kind of) entertainment. Hopefully the joke, as usual, is on me. It certainly felt like it today.
