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1978 (13 YEARS OLD)
Debbie, Debbie, I’m So In Love With You…

Debbie, Debbie, I’m So In Love With You…

1978 (13 YEARS OLD)1 month ago

1978 (13 Years Old)

Unlike today, there was a dearth of porn in 1970s England. You just simply had to make do. Especially if you were under 18. There was the Page 3 of The Sun, with its topless beauty (but my mum in her never-ending pursuit of poshness only had The Daily Express delivered); there were the Carry On films and Benny Hill, but I wasn’t allowed to watch them until I was about 15 (and by then they weren’t interesting); and the newsagents always carried “men’s mags,” such as Knave, Rustler, and Men Only. But they were on the top shelf, and you couldn’t usually get near them for all of the teenage boys casually leafing through Woman’s World, Good Housekeeping, and Popular Mechanics, which, funnily enough, were on the next shelf down.

Occasionally, there was the golden find, such as the Penthouse I found under a draw liner in a hotel in Blackpool. Or the magazine that Pisser Parish nicked from his older brother and hid in a hole in the bottom of the fence that belonged to our rugby teacher, Arse-Picker Hornsby. But the rain quickly took care of that.

So my erotica was limited to some nude Romanian stamps and a couple of my classmate Paddy Almond’s drawings. Later, after my return from my French-exchange program, I would add a pack of naked-lady playing cards to the mix.

But I had never seen moving nudity. Until one night, home alone, while I was flicking through the channels on the TV. The THREE channels. We had a fancy colour TV, but it was the seventies, and it had a knob that you turned: BBC One, BBC Two, ITV.

BBC 2 in those days had limited scheduling, and for the most part had “highbrow” programming – classical music concerts, 2-hour documentaries on the history of crop rotation, and, of course, Open University:

My parents were out, and I was watching the tele. It was about 9-ish in the evening, and I turned the knob from BBC to ITV, and as I quickly passed through BBC Two, an image briefly flashed on the screen.

No…

I went back, and there were a bunch of Romans having an orgy.

Handel’s Messiah rang out.

The series was I, Claudius and having gone back over it, there is no orgy scene. But in my memory there is. But there is nudity. And frolicking. I suppose that’s what passes as an orgy in an 11-year-old’s head.

I sat next to the tele, one hand on the dial, swivelling my head between the TV screen and the front door. Exhilarating stuff.

The next such big event happened about 2 years later. Again, my parents were out, and I was watching the forbidden Top of the Pops. I was in my Elvis and 50s rock and roll phase, so I was watching TOTP more to spite my mum than for the music.

Then Blondie came on:

Debbie Harry was gorgeous. She was sexy. She embodied the Madonna/Whore, the Dionysian, Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Love, all rolled into one.

But I didn’t know of such things at 13. So I came up with something along the lines of,

“Cor, she’s lovely.”

Which is still the best description.

And so I fell in love…