A Love Letter to Coming of Age with Soft Porn on Britain's Channel 5

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

What we wanked to before 1998 was limited. As dial-up internet took literally days to download videos of Jenna Jameson getting banged in an aircraft hangar, we were left with picture sites like the Hun's Yellow Pages, along with the underwear sections of Littlewoods catalogues and the Sun's Page 3.

Then there were the previews on the Adult Channel, but you could only see those if your parents went out and left you alone with the Sky box, which mine rarely did. Then there was Eurotrash, but I always found that a bit too weird to wank to.

Every night on my bedroom TV, I'd channel-hop looking for something to improve on the Page 3s I kept hidden underneath my bed, but nothing. That is, until 1998.

Until then, Channel 5 was known mainly for its association with the Spice Girls and for Jonathan Pierce's guttural roars on meaningless Thursday nights in the UEFA Cup. But in 1998 it redefined itself in the hearts of a generation by beginning to show the series Red Shoe Diaries—starring David Duchovny in perhaps his finest role—along with films that the Radio Times described as "containing sex scenes and nudity." From that point onwards, the landscape of wanking changed forever.

The NSFW trailer for 'Indecent Behavior' (1993), the first of three Indecent Behavior films

These erotic dramas were made mainly in the early 90s, with women wearing shoulder pads and houses decorated in floral designs. Each female star was beautiful, big-breasted, and thin. Each man was toned, tanned, and suffered neither from baldness nor premature ejaculation. Every film was named something like Mirror Images, Animal Instincts, or Body Chemistry, and they all had multiple sequels, suggesting—unlike Hollywood—it wasn't too hard to convince the same actors to return.

Most of the films were monopolized by the same two actresses: Shannon Tweed and Shannon Whirry. Both had blonde hair and both were goddesses, who—despite being young—were veterans at playing characters who wreaked havoc in environs like workplaces, marriages, and suburban neighborhoods. They both passed through like sex-spun tornados, causing men—and sometimes women—to lose themselves before inevitably setting sail. Each appeared strong but was actually weak; able to recognize their addiction to dick, but not cure it; driven to it with such vehemence that it could only be self-destruction.

Sex in these films is linked with darkness, dotted with dire faces, dreadful expressions and moody scores that all sound like Vangelis after a highly introspective cocaine experience. These women are proud of their ability to have sex, yet they're regretful once they have it, associating each new lover with one in their past. The men are the same: Despite having sex with goddesses, they all feel sinful.

Los Angeles's role in these films is huge. With each being made there due to budgetary constraints, LA's dark heart looms large over proceedings, with its harsh sunlight exposing everything as transparent. The acting is horrendous: eye-lines lower constantly, leading us to believe they're using cue cards. But so what? Not a Friday went by without me in bed by 11 with a tissue spread out in front of me.

Though the makeup of these films is essentially the same as porn (man meets woman under ludicrously-contrived pretext, man fucks woman), the difference lies in what they showed or, indeed, didn't show. No dick, no fanny—just tits and the actors' faces forever in the throes of ecstasy.

The theatricality of it would have been hilarious if not for my desperate need to cum. It was a race against time because my parents went to bed around 12—sometimes even earlier—and insisted on saying goodnight, so I stayed alert by keeping my hand on the remote and the TV muted so that, when they came in, I could change it to something I'd preselected beforehand. And though an hour should have been plenty of time, I couldn't spurn the perfect orgasm by not waiting for the right scene. Their ploy was to make you work for the sex by teasing you with shower scenes and sly looks, with the good stuff not coming until later. Though it was frustrating to lie there waiting for the shot of insinuated penetration that I needed, what could I do but continue anyway, hoping with increased fury that the next would reveal the frames I so desperately wanted?

I guess it depended on the mood of the screenwriters. I imagined them sitting there knowing that they required a ton of nudity, but still wanting to maintain the illusion that they were artists. Naturally, then, they'd delay it as long as possible, hoping that—by the time they did show it—people would be so involved in the story that they'd barely even care.

Most weeks, though, my experiences with these were sublime. Sometimes, if their writing allowed it, I'd orgasm so quickly that I could even manage another go-round. But these wanks were hellacious—sweat thundering down my forehead, the orgasm producing little more than a drop onto the already-wet tissue.

We spoke about these films in school, some boys acting out parts to laughter. But it wasn't until friends outside of school began speaking of them that I comprehended their reach, how there were probably thousands of boys all over the UK wanking to them—a synchronized communal orgasm every Friday night. The ridiculousness of it struck me—how there were probably thousands of us, but we were all inevitably hidden from the adult world when, if these films were anything to go by, adults needed sexual satisfaction arguably as much as we did.

I say arguably because masturbation back then was more uncontrollable than it is now, back when we used to build our days around it and use it to escape from school, rejection and all the other shit we didn't want to face. It was a bunker into which we dug ourselves as protection against a world we didn't understand, yet in every wank we still felt the absence of other boys, girls and that which we'd be craving until the day we finally had it—real sex.

So though it was great looking at breasts, and though we played it off in school in a grandiose way—"DID YOU SEE 'EM?"—I think a large part of watching shit like that is learning what sex is for when we have actually it. And though erotic dramas aren't perfect, teenagers now are loading up PornHub on their phones and looking at double anals without enough real-life context to know that that's even bigger bullshit.

The women in these old films aren't feminist icons, but compared to porn, they're not that bad. And while some porn is decent, erotic dramas at least feature a sex that's wholly mutual, passionate and considerate, which—in a climate of gagging, 20-minute blowjobs—seems quite nice.

Certainly there's upsides to the way porn depicts sex. At least with its graphicness, when a young person finds themselves in a situation, they'll know where everything is—which was a worry for me until the age of 15, when we finally got high-speed internet: up until then, I kind of thought women had three holes.

Nowadays, the films that Channel 5 once showed seem ridiculous, but we can't blame them for that. I do wonder, however, if parents are making things worse by maintaining the same culture of embarrassment mine and everyone else's did when I was young. Back when the worst that teenagers could do was stumble onto Channel 5, shit was relatively harmless. But now that double anal is only a search away, parents might need to have more conversations with their kids about what sex actually is, lest they turn out like pricks and expect too much when they have it.

The trailer for 'Mirror Images' (1991)

When I finally got high-speed internet myself, there became a point where, despite enjoying all the porn I was looking at, I was going back to the well too often. What'd once been an almost romantic act in masturbating (there, I said it) became something quick and quasi-medicinal because the stimulation I required was so readily available, and once I'd left the room I could barely remember anything that I'd just seen—not like Shannon Tweed and Shannon Whirry, who I still remember fondly over ten years later.

Tweed is 57 now and still looks great. She married KISS singer Gene Simmons and starred in their reality TV show Gene Simmons Family Jewels from 2006 to 2012. Whirry is 50. Though she doesn't seem to act as much any more, she did appear in the underrated Will Ferrell drama Everything Must Go in 2010.

So things change, and though in 2003 Channel 5 cancelled its erotic dramas in an attempt to redefine its image, the memory of them lives on in the hearts of thousands of 20-somethings across Britain who, because of those films, perhaps turned out sexually better adjusted than some in succeeding generations.

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