Sometimes if I’m too busy or I can’t be bothered properly researching an article I’ll use a tactic called Making Things Up. “But Fern,” you cry, “you’re not a real journalist so it doesn’t matter”. And you’d be right. Dispatches, on the other hand, is made by respected documentary-makers who lead you to believe that they’re getting to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately, The Hidden World of Lapdancing had more holes in it than a pair of crotchless knickers. And yes, I see the flaw in that metaphor as crotchless knickers have only one hole.
As investigative journalism goes, this was one in a long, long line of badly-researched pieces on sex work in which the programme makers, having already decided what their viewpoint is (namely, that all strippers are whores), reveal nothing new whatsoever.
Instead, we were subjected to an hours’ worth of a man expressing amazement at the fact that the girls didn’t stand three feet away from him interspersed with shots of lapdances as absurd ‘high-jinks’ music played (let’s face it, they may as well have played the fucking Benny Hill theme tune). Consequently, the tone alternated confusingly between one of moral outrage and pointless titillation.
Annoyingly, in an attempt to distract viewers from the fact that there was very little content, they would repeatedly play what appeared to be the opening titles of a James Bond movie, in which a silhouetted lady gyrates around appealingly. It was the adult equivalent of trying to distract a screaming toddler by saying “Look! Look at the pretty lights!”
On the upside, the programme unwittingly provided excellent publicity for the strip clubs featured, as I can’t envision many stag parties watching in horror when they discover that for £20 a pop you can see live lesbian action (“Did you SEE the tits on the women in Secrets nightclub? Let’s go there!”)
“Many of the lapdancers we spoke to were reluctant to be interviewed on camera” said the smugly judgemental narrator, sounding confused. What? You mean, ex-lapdancers refused to be interviewed for a programme that would be heavily biased against them, destroy their present careers and reputations and ultimately blame them as part of the problem and not a society which constantly renders women’s bodies as objects for purchase?
How strange.
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