The quiet dignity of Angela Rayner

In those gentle days before internet pornography there was a book you could buy which listed the precise moment in each Hollywood film when the sex scene began, or when the leading lady – very often Greta Scacchi – got her kit off, thus enabling one to buy the video, or rent it from Blockbuster, and fast-forward to the, uh, important bit.

Apparently the most requested fast-forward was of Sharon Stone in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct: a film as dumb as pretty much everything else the Dutchman has committed to celluloid, even if his reputation has lately been rehabilitated (for reasons I do not understand). Stone played a bisexual novelist suspected of murder and the scene in question comes during her interrogation by the police, when she uncrosses her legs, thus revealing to the detective – played by Michael Douglas – the briefest glimpse of her vulva, the shot lasting one-sixth of a second.