In September 1991 an unknown producer of gardening, cooking and pet videos “began the second sexual revolution”, says Michael Hann in The Guardian. Robert Page had been approached by Virgin to make an instructional film about condoms. Instead he convinced the British Board of Film Classification that British couples needed an explicit how-to film to help them with their sex lives. The result was The Lovers’ Guide – the first time an erect penis had been seen on British screens.
Watching the hour-long program now, it looks “unbearably innocent”: soft-focus, candles, couples who wander through fields before having gentle consensual sex to a lugubrious voiceover from veteran sexologist Andrew Stanway (whose stary eyes made him look like “a bad magician”). The first video starred two of his former patients, Tony and Wendy Duffield, who became “the Brad and Angelina of the sex ed video market”.
The Lovers’ Guide almost crashed and burnt when it emerged that Page had unknowingly hired a porn actor: Woolworths and WHSmith threatened to pull the video. But in the event it sold 200,000 copies in a fortnight and 1.3 million in total – 55% to women.
The film heralded a new era of sexual explicitness. By the decade’s end the BBFC had approved Makin’ Whoopee, which showed consensual penetration, for distribution in licensed sex shops. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, hit the roof: “Do you really mean that you are going to allow oral sex and buggery and I don’t know what else?” But his complaints fell flat. Censorship of porn in the UK effectively ended and the floodgates opened.
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