How Britain became one of the world's biggest distributors of illegal porn

Walk around the clean and gentrified streets of Soho today and there are few signs of its countercultural past. Although the miniskirts and music might be the resounding memory of the 1960s, it’s important to not forget the decade’s nefarious underbelly. The “swinging sixties” was a time of evolving music, fashion and mindsets. With that, sex – more specifically porn – was changing too. Where raunchy romance novels and postcards had previously dominated the market, the dawn of 8mm film cameras, and the means to watch the films at home, brought with it a wave of homegrown skin flicks. And though they were illegal to distribute in the UK, these locally-made sex films were being sold under the counters and in the backrooms of Soho shops.

Confusingly, during this time pornography and mainstream cinema were closer than they ever have been. Renowned producers Tony Tenser (The Sorcerers, Repulsion) and Michael Klinger (Get Carter) began their careers in the 60s screening arthouse and softcore porn at their pioneering Compton Club cinema. It was also around this time that the UK became one of the biggest creators and distributors of illegal porn in the world. By the end of the decade, the Odeon cinema in Kings Cross – a venue that would go on to become the Scala and host gigs by Ed Sheeran, Rhianna and Foo Fighters – was screening imported porn to hundreds of people at a time. That was until a major court case brought it all crashing down in 1974.

Dr. Oliver Carter is a researcher from Birmingham University who has been on a mission to find out how this criminal underworld operated, how the illicit porn business became so big and what brought it to an end. In his new book Under The Counter: Britain’s Trade in Hardcore 8mm Films he uncovers high level police corruption, dodgy BBC funding and a brutal gangland murder. I spoke to Oliver about his research, his book and London’s horny past.

Hi Oliver. So, what sparked your interest in porn and the porn industry?

Dr. Oliver Carter: My interest isn’t necessarily in pornography. I’m more broadly interested in how illicit or grey economies develop, culturally and economically, and how they evolve over time. I’m also fascinated by the role technology plays in this process, whether it be 8mm in the 1960s as a mass market distribution format, or the rise of home computing and mobile devices in the 21st century. It’s interesting how these processes play out again and again and how regulators attempt to control these practices.

How did you come across the illicit porn trade in London?

My first book was looking at how fans of a particular form of film called the Giallo – Italian cult film – created their own economy of fanzines and t-shirts and documentaries and bootleg VHS tapes. I was interested in how these were made and distributed, and how they played around with laws in order to bring these products to market and create these enterprises. There was a fan-made film called The Fantom Kiler. It was always assumed that these films, which were distributed to the fan community and were highly sexualised representations of the Giallo, were made in Poland by a director called Roman Nowicki. But if you watch the film, basically, it looks like Stoke Newington [in London], because the cars have British number plates.

So I tracked down the director and it was a British guy who was quite an important figurehead in this economy. We had a really interesting conversation, and I was interested in how these highly sexualised films were released without BBFC certificates. I looked at who’d written about hardcore porn in Britain and the legalities of releasing it, and found only a handful of people who had. So there's a space here. Most of the people who did write about it were non-academics or cultural historians, but a lot of it was based around an anecdote and the evidence to support always seemed kind of shaky.

Interesting. So, where did you start with your research?

I started doing some digging and found a series of books called I, Pornographer that were written by a man called Mike Freeman. They were distributed on Amazon. Written by himself, full of spelling mistakes, but they told the story in about 15 different volumes. He started making porn in the 60s in Soho – initially started off making photographs called Soho Postcards, then 8mm films. He had all these outlandish tales of the police chasing him, being friends with the Krays and paying the police for a licence to make porn. He said that the police effectively legalised porn by introducing a scheme where you paid them monthly and you could operate unhindered, providing that you followed the conditions of the licence.

But that license wasn’t actually legal?

It was not legal. I thought it was bollocks, to be quite frank, when I first read it. I thought, did Mike Freeman even exist? Was a hitman from the Krays really sent to kill him? How can I even find out if this is true? So I went to newspaper articles and I found out, sure enough, Mike killed a bloke – stabbed him 89 times in self-defence, allegedly. He claimed that this hit man was sent by the police on behalf of the Krays to kill him because he was causing trouble and threatened to expose police corruption.

Wow!

If you dig around you can find legal records too. They existed not just for Mike’s case, but for lots of other instances of pornographers. There were also thousands of photographs, lots of kinds of fanzines and these amateur-produced books called Soho Typescripts that were just people hopped-up on speed writing erotic stories. They’d stick in a few unrelated photographs and sell them at a high price in Soho bookstores and via mail order.

Did you end up speaking to the mythic Mike Freeman?

We tracked him down and did a two-day interview with him. He gave us this long story about his career as a pornographer, which just seemed like complete nonsense. But pretty much everything checked-out! Mike died two years ago. He was in hiding in Italy and he couldn't come back into the UK because he was on life licence for the murder of this bloke in 1969. He lived in exile and, when COVID hit, he and his partner ran out of money and they tried to come back to the UK. He was arrested at the border, thrown in prison, and died there.

What a story! In the era that you’re talking about, what classed as “hardcore”?

Erect penises, people having sex, penetration; that was strictly forbidden and illegal, but it was all being sold under the counter. Most of it was imported from the continent, where there were more relaxed attitudes, and it wasn't really until 1960 that Britain started to build their own trade. The reason it happened in Soho was because, as one interviewee put it, no one comes from Soho. It's a melting pot of different cultures and characters, so there were transnational networks. The French in Soho had familial networks who would send in or smuggle in porn that would be sold for huge amounts of money in Soho's bookstores.

Did you manage to speak to anyone from the Metropolitan police?

Well, there was the Obscene Publications Squad and they were the people who were tasked with enforcing the obscenity laws of the time. I spoke to one police officer who was working at the time and I asked, why was corruption rife? He just said to me, very simply, because the pay was shit. But it's more complex than that, I think. The police of the time and the criminals of the time; there wasn't much to separate them. A lot of them were working class; they drank at the same pubs and were part of the same networks, so they were in contact with each other. They mutually existed, in a way. So by having criminal networks the police could make cases, because they knew what was going to happen, because they were associated with members of the underworld. It was a benefit to the criminals, too, to know the police and what was going on. They came from the East End or from South London. They were the same culture, almost, and when the anti-corruption came in they tried to change that. That's when you saw police being brought from different communities and cultures and trying to change the way in which policing was done.

So they were very close together and that created the opportunities for corruption. That’s what I discovered from speaking to journalists who worked in Soho and from looking at all the newspapers, all the legal documents and the investigation into this corruption.

Then how did the UK become such a big player in the hardcore porn world?

Porn could be made here providing it was done behind closed doors and for export-only. I think [the growth] has something to do with the swinging sixties in Britain and the way that Britain was perceived internationally at the time. Particularly London and Soho were seen as having a permissive culture with great music, great fashion. There was something that was internationally very attractive about London and about Britain. That became a market saleable commodity. The porn of the time – these 8mm films called “rollers” – or even the photographs, the Soho Postcards, seemed to capture this zeitgeist, this cultural moment. So Britain suddenly becomes mass producer of 8mm porn by the latter half of the 1960s from nowhere. The films were smuggled into America where the copy was then reproduced and sold in the back pages of magazines over there.

Was it significant that the films were on 8mm?

Before the 8mm culture of filmmaking there was a 16mm culture, which had quite a limited audience. 8mm was really important because that was a domestic technology. It gave people the access to watch films in their home. 16mm projectors were really expensive but 8mm was cheaper, and people had disposable income after the war because of the post-war affluence. These were all really important conditions for why it grew.

Who was making the early films?

The early people seem to have a professional background. They just transferred their skills from, say, photography to filmmaking. People such as Mike Freeman who come in around ’67, Evan Philips, Ivor Cook…

Where does the BBC come into it?

In 1970 a Scottish pornographer called John Lindsay comes on the scene. He’s the only one who actively courts media attention. By the 1970s we still have this permissiveness of the ‘60s, but it’s almost like the moral boundaries are still being understood. People like John Lindsay were using this as capital. He was approaching it from a more countercultural perspective; saying that porn was countercultural. He used morality as a justification, like, “We're doing this to change Britain's restrictive censorship laws. We’re freedom fighters! We're fighting against the system!”

At the time, The Open University used to deliver their teaching materials late at night on BBC Two. So you would stay up to watch your course on the BBC. A sociologist called Geoff Esland was doing a series called Dirty Work about people in work that is “deviant.” Because John Lindsay is appearing in newspapers, Geoff contacts him and says, I’m from the BBC and I’d like to film you making a porn film. But it's going to be softcore, isn't it? John Lindsay agreed to make a softcore film.

But I found a legal document from the police investigation into this, and John Lindsay went against the agreement and made a hardcore film. The BBC paid for this film to be made and paid John Lindsay to make it. I have all the receipts and everything like that, but I can’t find the film, Street Poker, because it was destroyed… we think.

How did you choose and find the people that you interviewed for your book?

It was a challenge. I met someone whose family was associated with the Soho bookstores and he opened his little black book of contacts and told me I was five years too late; they’re all dead.

Some people I contacted didn't want to speak. They said they'd left that part of their life behind. Most people had died. What transformed things was finding the newspaper articles and the legal documents. The police had interviewed all these pornographers, so I had all these transcripts of interviews with these people who’d now died. I was able to use those, although I realised that they also probably lied to the police, so you take them at face value but then corroborate them with other sources like newspaper articles. That allowed me to build up these pictures. I also spoke to people who were the solicitors involved in the law cases.

What about the performers?

I was very careful approaching performers because I didn't want to dredge up their past. I just don’t know if or how they could have consented to making these films. It wasn’t like today, where if you make porn there’s this evidence of consent, records of everything. A performer from then could be a grandmother now, and they might have had a very difficult, traumatic experience. Some of these people were told that the films would be sold abroad only and not in the UK, which wasn’t true.