Atheletic auto-erotica!
Psycho Dave
Not content with dragging the good old US of A straight down to Hell
with its public displays of mass masturbatory degeneracy, the San
Fran-based Centre for Sex and Culture - organiser of the legendary
"Masturbate-a-thon" - will in August travel to London for a similar
event in which Brits will be invited to tug the trouser snake and pet
the beaver for the benefit of safe sex charities and Channel 4 viewers.
While the news that indie production company Zig Zag will be present in
Clerkenwell on August 5 to capture the solo cumfest will come as great
relief to C4 schedulers desperate - given the abject failure of Big
Brother contestants to engage in live sexual activity for the
gratification of the UK's viewing public - for footage of TV wannabes
cracking one off for charity, we're pretty certain that Middle England
is as we speak preparing to decry the utter collapse of British society
to the highest authority: The Daily Mail.
Indeed, the Guardian - which incidentally fails, like the exponent of
free love and sexual immorality that it is, to roundly condemn the
Masturbate-a-thon - notes that the Mail once declared former Channel 4
top dog Michael Grade "pornographer in chief".
And not without reason. Those of you who can remember the early, heady
days of Channel 4 will recall that the first signs of its eventual
descent into the squalid mire were already evident. In 1983, some
bright spark decided to commission Minipops - the highly-questionable
showcase for kids dressed as adults flaunting themselves for the Gary
Glitter demographic.
In 1985, the channel broadcast Derek Jarman's homoerotic martyrdom
spectacular Sebastiane, whose male full-frontal nudity and comedy Latin
dialogue provoked outrage in equal measure.
The rest, as we know, is history: Big Brother (social inadequates
failing dismally to indulge in live sexual activity); "Penis week"
(getting to grips with the penis, featuring lots and lots of peni); The
Tube (remembered for its Jools Holland prime-time "groovy fuckers"
scandal); and Jamie's Kitchen (unexpurgated Mockney geezer murdering
the word "pukka").
The prosecution rests. The televised Masturbate-a-thon, meanwhile, will
form part of a C4 "Wank week". Zig Zag declared in a press release:
"This year it's time to bring the event across the pond to see if the
great British public can embrace mass public masturbation. It's time to
find out if the only things allowed to be stiff in Britain are upper
lips."
No, there's another thing that can be stiff in Britain: a fine from the
Broadcasting Standards Authority. And if those of you in the Home
Counties who are right now writing to David Cameron demanding the
return of the birch, the cat o'nine tails and the Tyburn Tree for
transgressions of the UK's television guidelines consider this
inadequate punishment, what about tying the C4 commissioning editor and
Zig Zag producer to a couple of crosses and pumping them full of arrows
while naked Roman soldiers pleasure themselves to raise cash for AIDS
charities? Now that's what we call TV entertainment. ®