Back in the dark ages, in days when I did advice work, I shared a workspace with the council's Trading Standards department. This was useful as part of my working brief was to provide consumer advice so I could always ask for ideas/advice (which very often amounted to: "oh shit is he back in again?" For any of you not in the know, the worst thing that can happen to you when you do advice work is for an elderly gentleman in a club blazer to walk through the door with a bag full of paperwork in his hands.) "Donna's Hard Ride" - charged then at 75p a minute - turned out to be a girl describing a pony trekking holiday on Dartmoor.
Their regular chores involved breaches of the Trades Descriptions Act ("is this product/service as described?") and the laws on pornography. Every so often they'd do raids of the usual suspect and then have to watch the tapes to garner evidence. You could always tell when they were doing the latter because they'd be much more depressed than usual ("I'll tell you something, that's put me off boiled ham for a while!") Once in a while a few councils would band together against the forces of evil. The best one they did while I was there was an investigation of telephone sex services. After about three months' work they had to give up on most of the providers: the services they were providing were very far from being pornographic but they were, hilariously, still within the letter - if not the spirit - of the Trades Descriptions Act.
We couldn't find anything even remotely erotic about the whole thing. Which is remarkable given that we were all teenage males without a lot of luck engaging with the ladies.
Like many people of my age my first real porn movie was "Deep Throat." The Junior Common Room borrowed a copy from somewhere or other and a mass of us paid 50p each for the viewing performance. The video was an umpteenth-generation pirate copy with so much noise on it that it was a good twenty minutes before a restive audience could be convinced we weren't watching "Scott of the Antarctic."
Some of my contemporaries still can't listen to "Sinphonia antarctica" without getting an erection.
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4 comments:
'Smeg Dribbles' is another title that gets the punters in.
It's a video of a Smeg fridge freezer slowly defrosting.
Sx
The last line had me laughing out loud. Great stuff.
I always get an erection listening to "Sinphonia antarctica", it's images I get of penguins slithering about.
I had a classmate at school whose father was an Inspector in The Vice Squad, and who brought in many of his father's "confiscations", which I remember as being rather (ahem) tasteless.
Also back in the dark ages, the main source of pornography for young boys was what you'd find in the woods (left by proverbial dirty old men?).
I wonder whether the web has deprived our young lads of this arboreal source of stimulation. The old days were better: vice was combined with exercise and lots of fresh air.
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