Isn't it funny?

[Dickie Davies]

This great site started when the UK porn world was underground and Brit porn fans would find Louise Hodges and others in porn films on their visits to Europe.

There was a mail order firm in Amsterdam that specialised in identifying UK girls in films but unfortunately they went pop quite spectacularly.

Less than ten years after all this, UK porn is a lot more liberal and just tonight we have the first British Porn Awards.

My porn involvement dates back to the early 80s when all you could get were copies of Private and similar in sex shops. For newer readers, it's worth noting that things got softer from the late Seventies (open leg shots) to the much tamer early 1980s. It happened - and the Vice Squad was in its pomp, pulling stuff that would now be seen as tame.

Now we have this network, loads of confident, sexy women in porn, a good deal of producers and a legal distribution framework in the UK which is not perfect but at least is better than what went before.

Going through Harwich Parkeston Quay on my way back from Amsterdam back in the early eighties - a couple of Privates in the bag and some fierce HM Customs Officers ahead - the scene twenty years hence (ie now) would have been seen as a dream.

We may not have got everything we want, but tonight's awards and the Erotica Exhibition show how far Britain has come in the last couple of decades.

Never mind how one of my female colleagues reacted to the G2 pics of Daniel Craig in yesterday's Guardian........

The stiff upper lip is cracking and hooray for that!

[andy at handiwork]

Sadly the puritans are back on the offensive, enboldened by the impending prohibitions on so-called extreme porn. All those years, as you well described them, waiting to have legal porn in this country and now this. Many was the time I came through with a couple of copies of Private or Sex Bizzare in my bag, hoping to hell that I wouldn't get stopped. Never did, thank god.