From the Archives ... Lovely Louise (On the Nakedness of the Prostitute)

 

My fascination with the cards left in the now nearly vanished red phone boxes by London's prositutes advertising their services and physical charms, already had a long history before I decided to produce an adapted range of my own cards in the early 2000s, containing fragments of text taken from my Illicit Lover's Discourse project [click here].  

 

I suppose - using a term coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery - this might be described as a form of subvertising. Having said that, whilst my cards mimicked the look and feel of the original works, I wasn't attempting to undermine the sex trade, nor mock those involved in such.  

 

Rather, I was just playfully trying to introduce a little philosophical speculation into the world of vice and perhaps deconstruct some of the stereotypes and clichés that endlessly circulate within the pornographic imagination. 

 

Perhaps what I was doing might better be thought of as an apolitical détournement - i.e., something done just for the fun of it, with no real objective and free of all judgement.   

The cards - extremely limited in number - were placed in phone boxes in Soho and Paddington. Fuck knows if anyone ever saw them before teams from Westminster City Council removed them, but it pleases me to imagine that an illicit lover went round collecting them in the same way I went round collecting the real cards. 

 

Sadly, the only example I seem to have kept in the archives is a card featuring Lovely Louise (New - 19 Yrs Old), who specialised in solo exhibitions and strip tease. My addition to the card is a text in which I muse on the nakedness of the prostitute:

 

"Were we ever to succeed in peeling away that series of coverings given her by the pornographic imagination in order to ensure the erotic appeal of her flesh (and advertise its availability), the Prostitute would not merely be desexualised, she would in fact cease to exist. 

 

Knowing this, the Prostitute is very reluctant to remove her clothes (to have her strip always costs extra). And knowing this, the Illicit Lover is often a fetishist who realises that desire is aroused and sustained by signs and symbols of the surface; like the Greeks, he becomes superficial out of profundity."

 

 

From the Archives ... On My Dealings with Channel 4

My application for a job as an Assistant Editor 

(Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4

 

 

I.

 

My first dealings with Channel 4 were in the autumn of 1983, less than a year after the station started broadcasting. Rather naively, I believed that they fully intended to stick to their public service remit and provide a genuine alternative to the shit served up by the BBC and ITV. 

 

That is to say, provide 'a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which [...] demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes; appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society; exhibits a distinctive character.'

I was then collaborating with a spiky-haired student of Communications, Arts and Media called Gillian Hall on various projects and, encouraged by Alan Fountain - an independent producer hired by Channel 4 as a commissioning editor and mentor to new filmmakers - we submitted a proposal for a series that would be profoundly anti-Christian in nature and feature music, dance, witchcraft, sex-magick, and Satanic ritual.

 

In other words, we basically assembled ideas and images from all the usual suspects - from Aleister Crowley to Killing Joke (the album Fire Dances had just been released and I was under its spell all summer) - and visualised a kind of postmodern black mass with a post-punk soundtrack. It may well have been catastrophically bad had it ever been made - but it wouldn't have been Songs of Praise.

Alas, whilst initially intrigued by the proposal, Fountain lost his nerve somewhere along the line and Gillian and I were politely informed by letter that our Pagan TV show was not something that Channel 4 would be willing to commission, not least because many of the ideas that the show intended to explore were ones that the vast majority of people would find profoundly offensive.  

 

 

II.

 

Several years later, I again had dealings with Channel 4 - and again suffered the pain and disappointment of rejection (although these feelings were alleviated by the fact that I didn't give a shit).

 

Having failed to land a role as a presenter on the 24-hour cable and satellite TV channel the Music Box (a sort of naff pan-European version of MTV), Malcolm had advised me that I needed to be a 'little less Johnny Rotten and a little more Simon Le Bon'. With that in mind, I decided to apply for a job as an Assistant Editor (Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4, which I had seen advertised in The Guardian. 

 

The ad for the post (reference number BH01) made clear that applicants should have 'definite opinions regarding youth programmes, journalism and the youth entertainment market in general'. 

 

Well, I definitely had opinions regarding these things; unfortunately, they were largely (if not entirely) negative and, Sex Pistol that I remained at heart, I basically just wanted to destroy everything and cause as much chaos as possible. (Of course, I didn't list this under career goals and ambitions on my CV, though I suspect that something of my underlying nihilism shone through the bullshit that I did write.)

Instead of the requested covering letter to accompany the CV, I sent the above poster which clearly illustrated who and what they would be getting if they hired me. The text on the poster, which paraphrased Zarathustra and referenced a favourite song by Bow Wow Wow reads: 

'If culture is, before all things, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people, then barbarism is surely a lack of style; or a chaotic jumble of all styles. Thus we postmoderns, we parodists of world history and plunderers of the past, are the new barbarians: we are the TV savages! We are that hybrid breed, without meaning, substance, or style: we are Youth!'

 

I don't remember if anyone ever bothered to reply: if they did, I don't have the letter or recall its contents. 

 

And that, pretty much, was the end of my dealings with Channel 4 - a short (and not particularly spectacular) history of failure and rejection (but no regrets).

 

 

From the Archives ... The Bad Mood - by Lorrie

Lorrie Millington: The bad mood (c. 1983/84)
Chalk pastels on paper (210 x 297 mm)

 

 

I've spent the last couple of days going through a small portion of my personal archives - always a pleasure tinged with horror and sadness. 

 

Of course, it should be understood that when I say archives, I actually refer to a large number of cardboard boxes sat gathering dust in the loft, some of which I have been lugging around with me for the best part of 35 years, crammed full of all kinds of papers, photos, drawings, letters, notebooks, diaries, etc. going all the way back to the early 1980s.

 

Obviously, I didn't keep everything. And some things - including some of what were to me the most precious items - have been lost or destroyed; this includes, for example, much of the correspondence from Lorrie Millington (aka the Girl in the Mystery Castle).

 

One of the things I do still have by the above, however, is a self-portrait she entitled The bad mood. From a technical perspective, it may possess lots of faults. But I will always cherish this work; just as I will always fondly remember the young woman who drew it and the happy times we shared in Leeds.