London Blues Read Free Page A

everyone in them looked like someone youcould have gone to school with. They were the kids next door and the film could well have been made next door. Now the porno films from Germany, America and Scandinavia are shot professionally in good colour, with sync sound, incidental music and glam girls tarted up and expensively dressed like a page three bimbo opening a supermarket (well, in the opening scenes anyway – they soon strip off). But I guess it’s what you’re used to, what you grew up with. If I’m honest with myself I have to admit there’s a nostalgia factor in the appeal of these loops. They’re the first ones I saw, they are the ones I associate with my youth, with parties where I smoked my first dope, with the whole sixties whirligig.
    The first blue movie I ever saw was at a party in a church in Chelsea, or rather a small chapel that had been converted into a house by a newspaper photographer who then lived there. I went with a girlfriend called Sarah Breakspear who I can still vividly recall after all these years. The only redhead I’ve ever gone out with. In the middle of the party someone switched on a little 8mm projector and we all enjoyed an hour’s worth of sleaze. It was fun, there was a lot of laughter. Try doing that at your average party now.
    I’m thinking about the film and the sixties generally when I get an epiphanic answer to the question as to why the zooms lens was used in the first half of the film but not the second. The reason was simple. The guy who appeared in the film was the director/cameraman. Of course! When he was in front of the lens there was no one to operate the camera. He was the auteur (if stags are allowed such a thing) and, further, it was his room the movie was shot in. After all, didn’t he look the sort of guy who would have a picture of Bird on his wall?
    The video had continued turning after the end of The Boyfriend’s Surprise Visit … showing nothing but solid black. But now there was movement and sound – the end credits of Get Carter were rolling, but I wasn’t taking anyreal notice. I was still thinking about the blue movie. Who was the guy? What was his background? Did he make any other loops? Where is he now? What’s he doing? Who was the blonde? Who was the brunette? Where are they now? Did they travel by bus, underground, taxi or car to the shoot? What did they do immediately afterwards? What did they work at? Where are they now? If they’re married, do their husbands know about their work in the movies? Why did they appear? How much were they paid?
     
    The Boyfriend’s Surprise Visit. Not a very original title but then the whole genre is formula stuff right down to and including the title. Boyfriend implies in this context a sexual relationship, and if he’s surprising his girlfriend she’s obviously doing something naughty. What you think you’re getting you usually get.
    Years ago I had an inventory of British dirty films seized by the police from a wealthy collector and dealer who lived in St John’s Wood. I remember going through the list and thinking how dreary and unimaginative the titles were. There were some 500 of them. Nearly half were of The Boyfriend’s Surprise Visit kind – titles like Caught in the Act, The Handy Man, The Casting Couch, Geisha Girl, Night Nurses, and so on. The next largest group were the explicitly direct, Get Fucked, Arse Lovers, Dildo Delights, and similar. Out of this long list only three were really memorable – two for their humour and the third for its sheer bizarreness. The humour award goes to Los Effectos de La Marihuana with Incestral [ sic ] Home in second place. This is what passes for urbane wit in this neck of the woods. The oddest title was stolen from a British theatrical musical of the 1940s written by Ivor Novello: Perchance to Dream. What a genteel title for a fuck film even if it does feature a dream sequence.
    As I lay in the darkness edging into sleep the film kept running through my