MY teenage son has asked if red-top newspapers really behaved like that in the 1980s when I was a boy delivering them. He’s not going to f**king believe this:
Yes, they used to count down to a 16-year-old exposing her breasts
It just… wasn’t uncommon. Gave the working man on the bus something to look forward to. Look, Samantha Fox was 16 when she became a Page 3 girl and she was nationally famous. The age of consent was 16 and, well, that’s as far as our thinking went. In my defence I was 13 at the time, so as far as I was concerned I had a thing for older women.
Yes, there was endless speculation about the sex lives of teenagers
The girls mentioned above obviously and various others, like the ‘Wild Child’ phenomenon. Who were they? They were these girls aged about 13 or so who went out in nightclubs stripping and getting drunk and having sex with older men. One of them married a Rolling Stone. We assumed it was all of their own volition. I now realise wrongly.
Yes, ‘poofs’ was considered appropriate to use in a headline
What does it mean? Gay people, but don’t assume that such a light, fluffy word it wasn’t used in a vicious, hateful way. It absolutely was. It was regularly demanded that ‘poofs’ be sacked from any job, evicted from any housing and deported, especially if they were thought to be carrying ‘the gay plague’. Look, I’m just telling you what happened.
There were regular stories about sex vicars
What’s a sex vicar? Well, a vicar who has sex when he’s not supposed to, ie outside of a loving marriage to a mumsy woman. Instead he’s in a Soho peepshow, or having sex with a man in a toilet, or running off with the 16-year-old daughter of a parishioner, or disgracing himself in some other way. They were sort of celebrated. For shagging.
The problem page was a short photo story about sex
Every problem page features numerous made-up letters about sex and a photo story, running throughout a whole week, about a couple’s sexual problems. It was never just ‘my husband’s not interested’. It was always ‘my husband’s shagging the teenager next door and I’m having a lesbian affair with the vicar’s wife’. Not sure what the advice was.
Whole categories of society were scum
Poofs obviously, miners, all football fans, anyone who dared to be on strike including the printers of the tabloids themselves, students, lefties, layabouts, foreigners, foreigners over here, Russkies, Trots, every day there was a new category of people to hate. So pretty much like social media today, but a bit more undisguised and vitriolic.
