SATELLITE SOFT PORN

Jane Thynne on the way

obscenity laws are circumvented by international pedlars

IT'S a far cry from The Singing Detective. Two young women, in matching suspen- ders and suntans, get on the bed, take all their clothes off and caress each other. A variation on this popular theme involves a naked brunette who approaches the cam- eraman filming her and removes his trous- ers. Subtitles are provided, but there's not much dialogue.

Films like this have been making late night television more compelling for thousands of people in. Britain. For the past few months the adult erotic show Club Verotique, on the new Dutch Satellite station, RTL Veronique, has been located at the flick of a remote control button, one channel away from Rupert Murdoch's Sky News, which comes on the same dish.

But what the naked Dutch women have most significantly exposed is the gap be- tween the British Government's claims to oppose this type of salacious material, swept in with the tide of new satellite television, and its inability to impose moral control over the entrepreneurial broadcas- ters of Europe.

Veronique, and its equally adult sister station TV 10, as well as the forthcoming Italian channel Reta Mia, which features the now famous stripping housewife show, have all passed the decency standards set by Astra, the Liixembourg-based satellite from which they emanate.

When you first see the headquarters of Astra, in the Grand Duke's château in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, it is not porn films, but James Bond films which come to mind. Like the home of the traditional Bond villain, the palatial château has been gutted to make way for a £5 million decor of white marble and winking banks of monitors. Outside autumnal woodland shields a start- ling array of vast dishes, pointing in silent unanimity to the satellite 32,000 miles above.

The Grand Duke was obliged to sell his ancestral home because of gambling debts, but for the debonair Europeans who run the Astra operation the gamble seems very small indeed ® they firmly expect to have 48 channels on air by the mid 1990s. The operation already makes money, it is the pride of the Luxembourg government, and it has put the country on the television map. So to meet a crowd of British journalists who consistently associate this achievement with soft pornography, must be irksome.

`If you have ladies with bare breasts like on the beach, or nothing on at all, I don't see this as pornography,' says Pierre Meyrat, the dapper, pipe wielding, direc- tor general of Astra somewhat edgily. It does not take long to establish that with pornography, as with more mundane things, the British version is distinctly incompatible with the Continental.

In London, there is less diplomacy and more straight talking. Nick Thomas, one Astra spokesman, appears in a state of high exasperation when questioned about the Government's pronouncements over satellites and sex.

`The traditional frontiers of broadcasting have disappeared with satellite, and people are just going to have to take responsibility for what they watch,' he says. In particular, he is sceptical of the Government's claim to be able to pull the plug. 'If a European satellite wanted to transmit porn films direct to home, featuring a small child and a dog and all the other countries agreed, then there is absolutely nothing the Home Office could do about it. Instead of wor- rying about erotic material, which you can buy in any newsagent's in Britain, the Government should be thinking about the much more serious issue of foreign news coverage. British people are not used to seeing broken and bloated corpses on prime time news, which is what they have in Europe.'

The Government has indeed been in danger of casting itself as Canute's cour- tiers on the subject of satellite soft porn. As the debate rumbled on this year, the language of the then Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, became increasingly emo- tional. In September he said such services would be 'denounced' with a 'powerful deterrent'. By this he meant the powers the Government is about to award itself to fine advertisers on such channels, or those who provide services to them, or market de- cryption devices. An additional deterrent would be the appearance of Lord Rees- Mogg as a regular delegate to the Council of Europe, where as a last resort a case could be taken up by lengthy international arbitration. The new Home Secretary, with his avowed antipathy to pornography, will no doubt carry on the crusade.

Or at least will appear to. The question of legal strictures against satellite channels is fraught with problems. Even when these powers come into being in autumn 1990, they are unlikely to affect the likes of Veronique. One obvious loophole is the fact that the channels do not rely on British advertising. Also, Club Verotique has so far been broadcast unscrambled, (though opinion differs between Astra and Veroni- que's controllers whether that should al- ways be the policy,) so no decryption equipment has been needed, or could be seized.

But in the event that Astra did decide to bend to British sensitivities and broadcast naked women in scrambled form, the Government should bear the case of the Scandinavian channel Filmnet in mind.

Because of the technicalities of film copy- right, some output of Filmnet is broadcast scrambled in Britain. This has led to the emergence of a pirate industry for Filmnet decoders which are openly advertised for between £99 and £200 in the pages of

Exchange and Mart and satellite listings magazines. The Government's line on

satellite pornography has been richer in rhetoric than reason. But it may soon be that even the rhetoric will fade. British diplomacy could persuade the Europeans to scramble their salacious stuff. Piracy can he illegal, stocks of decoders can be seized.

But when pressed, Mr Hurd tended to

modify his statements, saying that the Government would only act if such chan- nels became a 'major public nuisance' — a situation that is hard to define and even harder to imagine.

For, after all, there are always free market considerations. One indication that Veronique and the like are here to stay is the fact that they appear to be fuelling a demand for sex on television. According to

a recent survey in Cosmopolitan magazine, 70 per cent of visitors to Holiday Inn hotels who watched bedroom television chose the porn channel.

A final ironic, though perhaps predict- able, point. It is the huge investment of Rupert Murdoch, a 'born again' Christian

who has banned Emmanuelle from his own movie channel, which is likely to facilitate

the arrival of the satellite soft porn. Mr Murdoch may foresee a 'major religious revival' in Britain, but I would hazard that

the Hour of Power preacher programme on Sky would flounder in the ratings beside Casino Casino, the stripping housewife show, set to arrive on the same dishes he has so strenuously marketed.

Jane Thynne is media correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.