The Reprobate issue 0

on how the election was going. Equally
predictably, the stuff everyone had tuned in
to see – the sexy bits – were kept until the
end. But at around 5.30 in the morning, there
it was. The nude chat show turned out to be
pretty dull, even then – I seem to recall blurry
footage of generally unattractive fat people
sitting around, naked and bored looking,
before doing something that may or may not
have been sexual – between the poor quality
camerawork and my black and white portable
TV, it was hard to tell. After several hours
of viewing, this would have been crushingly
disappointing had it been the entirety of the
naughtiness. But in fact, it was okay, because
we also saw clips from The Ugly George
Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence.
Ugly George (real name George Urban) was
a cable TV phenomenon. Walking the streets
of New York, dressed like a down-on-hisluck
extra from a really cheap sci-fi movie
(or perhaps a low-rent escapee from Studio
54) in a silver lamé outfit and lugging a huge
video camera, satellite dish and God knows
how much more equipment – designed to give
him hands-free access and not have to use
a viewfinder - about with him, George would
approach young women (or “goils”) and sweet
talk / brow beat them into accompanying him
back to some grotty apartment, corridor or
alleyway (or, to use his own words, ‘”dimly
lit hallways”), where they would strip with
varying degrees of enthusiasm, sometimes
accompanied by George himself as he came
out with a string of self-deprecating comments
while he dropped his pants and felt up the
hapless gal . George’s show happily showed
his successes and his failures (the latter
ranging from girls laughing in his face to giving
him a mouthful of abuse), his strange celebrity
encounters and his general meanderings.
It was entirely, utterly unique. And the few
moments shown to me in those early hours
had a major impact.
Over the next few years, clips from Ugly
George would occasionally turn up on TV –
usually in shows hosted by the likes of Clive
James or Chris Tarrant that laughed at the
terrible, trashy TV that the rest of the world
broadcast (while again using said terrible
TV to boost ratings). He also turned up in
anti-porn polemic Rate It X in 1986, naturally
portrayed as a predatory monster.
The more I saw – brief, tantalising moments –
the more intrigued I became. By this time, I’d
seen plenty of actual, no-nonsense hardcore
porn on video, but Ugly George was different.
His work seemed more honest, more real. I
needed to see more.
But doing so was almost impossible for
a teenager in Northern Britain. Mary
Whitehouse might have condemned the
newly-born Channel Four as the home of
smut peddlers, but they were hardly going to
start importing this show – the best we got
was ‘risque’ Canadian sketch show Bizarre,
which ITV gave a run in the early Eighties
and - gratuitous boob shots or not - it was
hardly the same. British softcore video
magazine series Electric Blue seemed
to have the answer when they released a
compilation tape, imaginatively called Ugly
George. But Electric Blue had fallen foul of
Manchester’s evangelical Chief Constable
James Anderton, who issued a fatwa against
the strand – enough to put most video rental
shops off stocking the series. Then came
the Video Recordings Act, and the tape was
pulled from sale until it was finally approved
by the BBFC in 1989 – ludicrously (even for
the time) rated R18, which restricted its sale
to licensed sex. There were few licensed sex
shops around back then, and most of them
didn’t sell Electric Blue titles, so in reality,
the availability of the tape was pretty much
restricted to EB’s own Kings Cross store,
where a tape would cost forty or fifty quid.
And by the early 1990s, both the Electric
Blue label and their shop were confined to the
dustbin of history.
But by 1989, the influence of Ugly George had
begun to seep out into the porn mainstream.
John Stagliano shot his first Buttman
film - The Adventures of Buttman - that
year, effectively giving birth to the ‘reality’
(actually staged, but with a first person
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