The Top Shelf

 

Around the year 1975 I discovered the world of second-hand bookshops. All it took was a few visits to get me started on collecting old paperbacks and annuals of the past decade. I soon learned that there were bookshops and bookshops – especially when one went into Birmingham city centre. Here there were shops that looked intriguing from a distance but up close revealed themselves to be purveyors of a very different kind of literature. Not the kind of emporia where one might expect to find that sought-after Man From UNCLE paperback. The names of these establishments usually served as a warning to the unwary – ‘Continental Book Exchange’ being a typical example. There was a well-known shop up in Birmingham’s Summer Row that sold not only ‘continental’ books but paraphernalia of dubious provenance and off-putting appearance. This was, after all, the 1970s and if we were to believe the mass media, we were living in the so-called ‘permissive society’.

The permissive society was a pernicious idea that gained a lot of ground during the 60s and 70s, espoused for the most part by liberal types who confused freedom of thought and speech with freedoms of a more prurient nature. I’m not sure that it ever really existed other than as a construct, the lifestyle it implied being open only to a privileged few centred on London and the Home Counties. Elsewhere, the only real evidence for its existence was to be found on the top shelves of pretty well any newsagent. The fact that soft porn was so easily obtainable from such mundane sources seems shocking today, and (without looking, you understand), I’m fairly certain that times have changed. As a teenager in 1970s Britain, I soon acquired the habit of deliberately averting my gaze from that certain shelf. Merely to be seen looking, even accidentally, was to risk being marked down as a potential pervert or troublemaker. I still can’t imagine how anyone – even those of the stereotypical ‘dirty mac’ fraternity – would have the gall to take down a copy of something like Penthouse, then take it to the counter and pay for it. Popular mythology suggests that the magazine in question was usually folded inside a more innocuous periodical on gardening or fishing, but as I have never witnessed anyone buying such a publication, I’ll have to take that as read.

Of course, for those who balked at the idea of purchasing an actual magazine, soft porn images were to be found every day on page three of The Sun, which began using them as bait for gullible male readers around 1970. The term ‘page three girl’ soon entered the language, and other newspapers followed suit. In our house, we stuck with The Daily Express, where at least we got the Giles cartoon.

As we entered the third form at grammar school, a few of my friends began to produce examples of soft porn magazines that they’d acquired somehow. Nicked? Borrowed from an older sibling (or even their fathers)? I knew from the outset exactly what I thought about them: I hated them. I even hated the kind of super-shiny paper on which they were usually printed. Why did the pages have to be so slick and glossy? I’m sure there was a sound practical reason which is best left to the imagination. There was something profoundly seedy and unpleasant about seeing one’s school friends poring over such salacious literature. I was in no doubt as to my sexual orientation – straight – but those magazines were a turn-off. Some of this may be down to association, as the types who tended to flaunt them were often boorish and dull of intellect. This was well before the age when anyone spoke of such literature as being demeaning to women, but I still knew that it wasn’t for me. Nevertheless, peer pressure dictated that one had to put on a show of ‘going along with it’, and I think a folded centrespread may once have found its way into my possession, simply because you couldn’t be seen to be turning down an offer like that. Owning it was like being handed a lump of plutonium. Where the hell could you keep it that your mum wouldn’t stumble across it whilst tidying your room? I’m not sure what I did with it or if I’m misremembering the whole thing. I do know that the first image of a nude woman that ever legitimately came into my possession was contained within the covers of a book published by The Goodies around 1975. And there were some Victorian examples in Monty Python’s Big Red Book. Even so, I usually skipped over the pages in question.

One of the first television programmes to deal explicitly with the topic of pornographic literature was Budgie (above). Adam Faith’s low-life loser worked as an odd job man for Soho porn baron Charles Endell, played memorably by Iain Cuthbertson. Interestingly, Endell avows complete distaste for pornography and makes it quite clear that he despises the pathetic types who frequent his shop. Its interior – which appears to have been accurately realised – was the first time, barring documentaries, that television viewers had seen inside a ‘dirty bookshop’. In the very first episode, Budgie and his dim mate Grogan accidentally knock off a van-load of hardcore en route to the public incinerator. ‘I didn’t know you could do it like that, Budgie,’ muses Grogan, peering at a page from one of their purloined publications. ‘At your age!’ scoffs Budgie. Then he has a look for himself: ‘Gor blimey, neither did I!’

I was just ten years old when Budgie appeared on screen, but I saw nothing of it beyond the opening titles. Programmes like this were safely tucked away beyond the nine o’clock watershed, and it wasn’t until a mid-80s repeat by Channel 4 that I saw what had been going on. By this time, I’d visited Berwick Street and the ‘naughty square mile’ for myself, this being the sector of London in which a lot of film post-production studios were located. My visits were to oversee recordings of voice-overs I’d scripted for TV commercials; and whilst some of the old Soho was still in evidence, there was little left of the explicit ‘they are naked and they move’ era depicted in Budgie. Unless it all came out at night.

Like most people, I was shocked at the revelation, by his biographer Andrew Motion, that the poet Philip Larkin had owned a secret stash of pornography, albeit of the so-called ‘soft’ variety. From what I’ve seen, some of it was almost laughably naive, consisting of the ‘underwear catalogue’ era of porn that was popular in the 40s and 50s when Larkin was a young man – in many cases, there was no actual nudity on show. Even so, there was still something a bit grubby about the idea of a grown man, and a university librarian at that, gazing at images of ‘scantily clad bathing beauties’ in his down time. Was it right to be shocked, though? Modern sensibilites certainly say so, but in the 60s and 70s, Larkin was just one of the thousands of men who routinely used such material. If it hadn’t been a money earner, the magazine proprietors wouldn’t have published so much of it. At the time, it was just another ‘fact of life’ that we learned to live with. It didn’t automatically follow that every heterosexual male was a potential client for the porn barons, but those of us who weren’t didn’t pay much attention to the others who felt the need for it.

One of my other hobbies during the late 70s was 8mm movies, and here again, I might easily have fit the profile of the pornographer’s ideal customer. Except that in my case, it wasn’t blue movies that interested me but black and white ones, specifically old episodes of Fireball XL5 and Stingray. It must be said, though, that the company who released these titles, Walton Films, had done very nicely thank you from their range of so-called ‘glamour films’ which featured in their catalogue during the 1950s.

As with bookshops, so too with the cinemas of Birmingham – there were those which one knew well to avoid: specifically, the ‘Sunset Cinema Club’ and the ‘Jacey Cinephone’, both of them located just two minutes walk from the office where I worked for five years during the mid-80s. These establishments tended to open around lunchtime, and I genuinely recall seeing members of the ‘dirty raincoat brigade’ waiting patiently outside on the pavement. The closest I ever came to a blue movie was when a seedy exploitation flick turned up as the supporting feature to Assault on Precinct 13 – itself hardly a model of uplifting cinema.

It’s been a long time since I bothered to check in any newsagent or branch of WH Smith, but I’m fairly confident that magazines of the type one saw on display in the 1970s are no longer on view. The internet has hoovered up a lot of the trade for prurient imagery – indeed when I first tried using a search engine in 1998, about 90% of the hits were pornographic, and I’d been using some utterly innocuous terms in my searches. The 1990s saw the arrival of a different kind of magazine, the so-called ‘lad mag’ which aimed for a middle ground between Penthouse and What Car. I found these laughable and pathetic and have only ever glanced at their pages when there was nothing else on offer in the dentist’s waiting room. The whole sorry era of so-called ‘lad culture’ seems to have been born as a reaction to an increasing tendency across the media to espouse soft liberal values and adopt a high-handed attitude towards public morals. As is so often the case, the trend went too far in the opposite direction.

There aren’t many aspects of modern culture and sensibilites that I agree with, but I have to say I welcome the turning of the tide of popular opinion against the unquestioning acceptance of pornography as an inevitable aspect of modern life. However, a note of caution must be sounded; for when pornography was more visible and above the counter, it was accordingly easier to monitor and keep in check. Today, the mags may be gone from the local newsagent, but there are far worse things accessible online than Charlie Endell ever sold in his Soho bookshop. Are we any better off?