Television - Andrew Billen is not excited by a punishing documentary about Victorian pornography
It was late at night on Channel 4, said Ali G on the last of his programmes, and therefore time for "punani". How well the man knew his station, although Channel 4 always offers two defences for its pornography. The first, which covers most of it, is that it is meant to be funny, not erotic, an excuse that denies a long tradition of sex comedies shown in seedy West End cinemas. The second defence is that it ain't porn, it's social history.
Thus was Walter: the secret life of a Victorian pornographer (Tuesday, C4). Walter, the pseudonym of a well-to-do Victorian gentleman, kept 11 volumes of journals, running to some 1.5 million words, all of them recording his sexual encounters. Walter had sex with 1,200 women, most of them prostitutes. Within minutes, the programme had ferreted out the punani section of the diaries' index. "Cunts: entrance small, vagina large" was the heading. "Full-sized, large, large and fat, v large outlet, horse collar looking, peculiar looking, and roly-poly lipped." It read like a samizdat plumbing catalogue.
Because he was making his film for a respectable channel, the writer-director Rob Rohrer knew he needed to make a strong case that Walter had shaped our understanding of Victorian sexuality. Walter indeed wrote that he had simply recorded a "narrative of human life - perhaps the everyday life of thousands if confession could be had". But it was hard to upgrade that "perhaps" into a "probably". Walter could be typical of many, few or just himself. Equally, he might simply be a fantasist. True, there was certain internal evidence that he was not, namely that accounts of impotence are not the stock-in-trade of pornographers, but, as Dr Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Library pointed out, self-deprecation may have been a literary strategy in itself, a device to create verisimilitude. In any case, she was mightily unimpressed by Walter's more constant insight that whores were "gagging" for his enormous "pego" (beast).
In an attempt to turn Walter into a more reliable witness, the programme did what it could to prove that Walter was the nom de plum of one Henry Ashby, "a wealthy Victorian silk merchant" (the script naffly inserted the adjective "Victorian" where it could). Ashby's octogenarian granddaughter obligingly read out entries from her grandpa's dirty diaries. These were not dissimilar from Walter's in content. The script muttered about shared sexual fetishes, but could only tell us that Ashby once treated himself to a hermaphrodite and Walter to a woman with two vaginas. Since no one bothered to make stylistic comparisons, the only indication that they were one and the same was that Walter's journals were mostly written between 1850 and 1871 and that Ashby's had a gap from 1858 until 1873.
The programme now felt itself obliged to find significance in the subsequent history of the diaries themselves. As an account of the continuity in social hypocrisy, the narrative here made a good case. One of the first buyers of the printed diaries was Prince Louis Battenberg, and the volumes remained in royal hands until the Sixties, when the third marquess of Milford Haven, best man to Prince Philip, quietly disposed of them, thus narrowly escaping the embarrassment of being in possession of a book that got a Bradford printer, Arthur Dobson, jailed for two years in 1969. Poor old Dobson, we thought, and poor Walter, who a century before had complained of Britain's periodic "fits of virtue".
After the break, however, the programme rather unexpectedly turned on its subject. Now we were told that Walter equated sex with money (not too surprising, since he had to pay for it), that he regarded working-class women as members of a different race, that he exerted a rough droit de seigneur over servants, took pleasure in inflicting pain on virgins, and hired ten-year-old girls.
Walter, said Fraser Harrison, a writer on Victorian sexuality who until then had seemed charmed by the interest Walter took in the conversations of his bedmates, was "absolutely heartless". We flashed back to 1969 and the sentence handed down by the judge. Who now could not, after all, agree that Dobson was "a professional purveyor of filth"?
You'd have known that the documentary was belatedly making Walter a villain even with the sound down. The first two parts were full of soft-focused young actresses exposing well-rounded breasts (no punani, of course). The limply unthreatening pego of John Lloyd Fillingham, the actor cast as Walter, made its rakish progress through a series of bed chambers straight out of the Past Times catalogue. In the last 20 minutes, however, all flesh was banned and, under harsh light, a smirking Fillingham made smash and grab raids on flat-chested women dressed in layers of whale bone. Detumescence.
The film thus followed the pseudo-logic of soft porn in which the licentious who have provided so much entertainment are punished in the last reel. It would have been easy to make a serious documentary about Walter without commissioning any soft porn re-enactments at all, but Channel 4 chose not to. Not for nothing did Ali G scribble out "Channel 4" on his end credit and crayon in "Channel 5".
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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