LORD LONGFORD'S COMMITTEE
1. We Porn-probing zealots
GILES BRANDRETH
Much have I travelled in realms of fantasy, but never in my wildest dreams or most outlandish nightmares did I visualize myself as part of a charabanc outing quite so outrageous as the one which took me, with Lord Longford and four other porn-probing zealots, to Copenhagen last week. It wasn't the mission or the company that gave the proceedings their Lewis Carroll flavour. Of course, even the briefest contact with the sort of pornographic material that includes ladies copulating with ageing beasts of burden and even the slightest encounter with a pornographer who is, and always has been, totally blind tends, if not to deprave or corrupt, at least to give one the feeling of having strayed into a very bizarre Wonderland. Even so, it was not the porn, nor its purveyors and purchasers, that lent the Danish expedition its topsyturvy quality of lunacy. It was the press. And the British press at that.
In the course of our sojourn in Copenhagen to study the effects of the
abolition of censorship there, we spent two full days talking to a variety of officials, criminologists, sociologists and churchmen, and about ninety minutes actually reaping the porn. This fact naturally did not deter the British newsmen, ever eager to satisfy the voyeuristic instincts of the great British public with The Truth about Sin City.' If ever one needed proof that we in this country have a sadly repressed attitude to sex, an attitude which far prefers to snigger or giggle nervously at the subject than discuss it seriously, then the coverage of last week's trip provided that proof.
The Danes, of course, take sex in their stride. Mere mention of the word does not throw them into a frenzy of sexual excitement. Indeed, the Danish press followed our party's progress without recourse to hysteria and actually managed to report our talks in some detail. They were taken aback by the British press's neurotic fascination with the seamier side of Copenhagen life and openly amused by the quaint enthusiasm of the British photographers scrambling over one another at the 'Live Shows' to get better shots of the assorted bottoms and boobs. One Danish reporter was sufficiently tickled by the antics of his British counterparts that he tipped off the hostess at one of the clubs we visited, with the result that the News of the World photographer had his spectacles confiscated by a totally naked nymphet who did her best to hide them about her person.
Longford has been accused of having staged the exercise out of a love of publicity. Believe me, the man is incapable of anything so devious. I say this without any intention to sound patronising because it is true: he is the last of the real innocents. A man quite devoid of malice, he even assured the Daily Mirror reporter that he wouldn't dream of complaining about that paper's comically inaccurate report of splits and furious rows, "Because you're a young man and you have a long and important career ahead of you."
Innocent he is. Naive he'll never be. It was the press who showed naivety when they rushed to their telephones the moment Lord Porn, as the Sun endearlingly dubbed him, walked out of the first sex show. He remarked as he left the Private Club, " I have seen enough for science and more than enough for entertainment." True, but was that the real reason he left so soon? Was he really, so disgusted that he couldn't cope with the situation a moment longer? That's what the press thought anfi that, I suspect, is what he hoped they'd think. I, on the other hand, think that the gartered Earl is a bit sharper than that. At the show he was attending, naked ladies mingled with the tiny audience, offering to sit in their laps and play with their persons. Lord Longford allowed a whip to be foisted on him. Imagine what might have happened had a young lady landed in his lap! Click, flash and hey presto, around the world in eighty seconds go stunning photographs of the sixty-five-year-old English milord with a Danish dolly in the raw giving him a friendly fumble. Gerald Scarfe did powerful things with that whip sequence. Think what he might have been able to do had Lord Porn had hotter stuff to handle.
As it happens, the much-mocked jaunt served its purpose. It exploded the myth that Lord Longford's self-selected study group was composed entirely of stooges, carefully chosen and chaste card-carrying Christians to the man. It also gave us a chance to learn something about the actual effects of the abolition of censorship. Of course, the Danes are not sex-sodden monsters of depravity. Indeed, their attitude to matters sexual seems far healthier than ours. There is nothing like a few days in the company of the British journalist to convince one that the prototype of the Dirty Old Man-was made in Britain. And the expedition helped me achieve a personal ambition. I had always wanted — at least from the age of four — to be a clown. For almost twenty years I have wondered what life in the travelling circus is like. Now I know.
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