London Lights
THAT strip clubs have been multiplying in London recently is generally known : that the resulting competition tends to provide their patrons with more bizarre and more salacious performances could reasonably have been in- ferred. But the account which Kenneth Allsop gives in this number of the Spectator will come as a shock to those who imagined that the enter- tainment provided is akin to that which Windmill audiences have long enjoyed, or to that provided by road shows scouring the provinces under such titles as No Nudes is Bad Nudes. London 'clubs,' Mr. Allsop has found, are now providing their members with programmes of a kind which they would be hard put to to find in any other city in the world.
No doubt if the facts were more generally known there would be an outcry for a clean-up campaign. But there is no evidence that business- men—who appear to make up the hard core of strip-tease audiences—are depraved by gratify- ing in this taste; what evidence there is suggests that. on the contrary, the spectacle—if indulged in sufficiently often—is more calculated to bore than to inflame. In any case, the lesson of Pigalle, as Peter Michaels's article suggests, is that simple nudity can become a bourgeois, almost a family spectacle; no more, often a lot less, debauching than an evening's pub-crawl.
What is unpleasant about these London strip clubs is not so much their existence as the hypocrisy which the fact that they exist reflects. For the payment of a token membership fee it is possible to see in comfort—surrounded by tycoons. with perhaps an MP or two for good measure in the audience—performances which would be instantly prosecuted if they were put on in a theatre or cinema. It is not even possible for a writer to set down, however clinically, exactly what can be seen on these club stages: no printer would print it, no publisher publish it, for fear of exciting the attention of the Director of Public Prosecutions. It is surely a grotesquely anomalous situation when the mildesi of entertainment in a pub may still be the sub- ject of prosecution, while a strip club next door can give its patrons exactly what they want with- out any risk of interference by the law.
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