Porn

It was recently reported that almost 8 per cent of global internet traffic is to pornographic websites. The rise of working from home may make this statistic less startling than it might have been three years ago, but still, that’s an awful lot of procrastination and, well, not much WFH. Given the dominance of the porn industry, it’s a wonder there hasn’t been an exposé of the kind produced by the Financial Times before now. The newspaper’s investigation into who lurks behind the webcams and controls this business took more than six months to complete and has now been turned into a riveting eight-part podcast series. Hot Money: Who Rules

A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie out of shot, she then films herself on her phone pretending to have an orgasm, posts the clip online and drives to work. Once there, she’s constantly distracted by thoughts of domestic chores (‘Whites tonight, colours in the morning, hang them out before the school run’) — which mightn’t be so unusual, except that her work consists of having sex. But if the early scenes in Channel 4’s new porn-industry drama Adult Material suggested a cheeky, essentially light-hearted twist on female life-juggling, this soon proved deceptive. What followed was an

Every so often an idea for a show will come along that is perfect, and therefore should never be made. A sitcom based on Julian Assange’s time in the Ecuadorian embassy. Or a gender-flipped version of What Women Want. These are concepts to treasure, to return to, to discuss with friends. Once made flesh though, they disappoint. And this is what happened with the podcast My Dad Wrote A Porno. Here’s the concept. One Christmas Jamie Morton is asked to review a self-penned manuscript by his dad, which turns out to be astonishingly bad erotica written under the pen-name Rocky Flintstone. Morton recruits two old friends — BBC Radio 1

What can parents do about the avalanche of pornography available to their children on tablet, phone and laptop? This question was the starting point for a documentary series that began on Wednesday — and the answer proved unexpected. Having gathered five mothers together and shown them a hair-raising selection of online filth, the programme blithely declared that the best way for these women to ‘make a change’ was ‘by making their own mum-approved porn film’, which they’d then screen for their families and friends. If this premise struck anyone involved in Mums Make Porn (Channel 4, obviously) as at all questionable, they didn’t mention it. Instead, the programme simply went

Regular filmgoers must be losing count of the Rabelaisian revelries they’ve been invited to of late. You may recognise the type of do. The camera ushers you through a door and, wham, the music’s strafing your eardrums and everyone’s letting their hair down along, often, with their underwear. There’s usually a white horse grazing by the pool. The Ballard adaptation High-Rise has one such scene, as do the latest Le Carré film Our Kind of Traitor and the Saudi-set Tom Hanks vehicle A Hologram for the King. Throw on your party shirt and roll up for another courtesy of The Nice Guys. ‘Dad, there’s like whores here and stuff,’ says

A beautiful crumbling theatre in Notting Hill is under threat. The Coronet, which bills itself as the Print Room, faces the menace of renovation. The lovely rambling building has the tumbledown air of an abandoned Romanian palace. The raised stage sits opposite the dress circle of a former cinema and the auditorium, steeply raked, is bounded by a parapet decorated with plaster reliefs of scarred mermaids and broken-winged angels. A modern design team is bound to strip out all this ramshackle charm. The ragged, gloomy corridors, scented with damp brick dust, will be rationalised into glistening avenues of spotlit perfection. And the weird and ungainly bar area will become a

And so, in the end, I went with my sister, Toni, to see Fifty Shades of Grey and we saw it at noon on Valentine’s Day at the Odeon in Muswell Hill. In the audience on that particular day at that particular time there were eight other women, all around our age, and all on their own. The Fifty Shades phenomenon has been described as ‘soft porn for middle-aged housewives’ and it’s said as an insult, but it sounds rather good to my sister and me. Indeed, after what feels like a lifetime of pairing socks and putting meals on the table and basically performing the role of main drudge