Inside the Pornography Business
After Dark was a live television discussion series that was produced by Open Media and broadcast initially on Channel 4 in the UK between 1987 and 1997. It usually started before midnight and ended when the host and the guests decided that enough was enough; …
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David Hebditch is still writing books and producing documentaries for television. Here he looks back at the origins of Porn Gold.
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Who are the ‘Porn Barons’? Who are the ‘Pop Porn Stars’? Who buys porn? Where and how is ‘porn gold’ to be made? Pornography in the late 1980s was associated in the British Public’s mind with Linda Lovelace, Penthouse and ‘Adults Only’ cinema clubs. But what lay behind the Emmanuelle sagas, top-shelf magazines and the windowless doors of the massage parlours? Beyond these lurid clichés was an international business with a staggering three billion pound turnover. In the previous two decades, changing legal and social attitudes, combined with new technology, turned the international trade in pornography into one of the world’s biggest and most controversial growth industries. By 1988 more than ninety per cent of hard-core pornography was produced, distributed and sold unhindered by law. Two investigative journalists, David Hebditch and the late Nick Anning, spent two years in search of the answers to these questions. Porn Gold was the result. Now it is published for the first time as an affordable eBook edition containing the original photographs and a new Preface by Dr Oliver Carter.
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