Fetish Dayz

Doctor Who Christmas Day special is a runaway success

The Christmas Day Doctor Who special The Runaway Bride, with Catherine Tate playing a mouthy wife-to-be who finds herself transported from the altar to the Tardis before getting to say ‘I do’, was a brilliant way to kick off the evening’s TV. With its arachnoid alien villainess played by Sarah Parish (below) in a prosthetic outfit reminiscent of one of Midori’s wilder creations, this one-off episode was a welcome return to form by writer Russell T Davies after the disappointments (for me at least) of the spin-off Torchwood series.

Despite John ‘Tom Cruise’ Barrowman’s best efforts, Torchwood has never achieved the kind of chemistry between its lead characters that was established in an instant between David Tennant’s Doctor and Tate’s bride, an unlikely but totally inspired pairing (above).

However, I’m not sure that I believe all that stuff in the press about everyone being really disappointed that Catherine wasn’t offered the job of Billy Piper replacement when the new Doctor Who series arrives in 2007. Tate is already established as one of Britain’s top comic talents through her own TV series, and frankly she’s too versatile to be locked into playing one character in a long-running drama, and too good to be playing sidekick even to someone as charismatic as David Tennant.

Me, I’m more than happy to give the Doc’s impending new assistant Martha Jones (far left) a fair chance. She looks like she might turn out to be quite a spunky chick.
www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho

Fetish Fashion has a (seasonal) Sunday Times moment

We’re all used to the women’s fashion and style pages getting a little more interested in erotic clothing as Christmas approaches. It’s that time of the year when the media fashionistas are most likely to mention lingerie, stockings, high heels and other kinds of sexy garb without the accompaniment of involuntary shuddering.

However, I have to say that the Sunday Times Style supplement excelled itself with its December 17 spread The good, the bad and the kinky. Teasing us with a contents-page picture by Perou of Midori in her legendary latex kimono of a few Rubber Balls ago (left), the magazine declares: “Fetish fashion is having a moment. But where is it coming from?”

The answer, according to the piece’s author Tony Marcus, is Torture Garden. Which is handy, because almost the entire piece is devoted to his account of a visit to one of TG’s parties at Mass in Brixton. Here, the writer, clad in an electric blue bridesmaid’s dress and hold-up stockings, encountered “insect-shiny catwomen” in black catsuits on the door, before entering the main dance area populated by “a lot of stern looking ladies in rubber skirts, high heels, high heels, high boots, tight corsets and rubber nurse outfits”. Who would have believed it, at Torture Garden, eh?

Soon. of course, Marcus is tackling the thorny question of just how much pain and pleasure is actually there for the taking. Every journalist writing about fetish clubs for the vanilla press always has to address this issue. And, like so many of his profession who’ve trod this road before him, he seemed a little disappointed by the lack of the kind of debauchery he’d hoped to find at TG.  Marcus felt most of the club’s denizens weren’t doing “anything particularly frightening” but admitted there was still a “whiff of latent danger” in the air. Interestingly, he decided it was “all a bit public school in the days of coroporal punishment”, an accusation I doubt has ever before been levelled at TG of all organisations. Makes you wonder just which public school Marcus went to, yah?

Contrary to the promise of the subheading, the piece doesn’t actually establish the connection between what goes on at TG and current mainstream manifestations of kinkery such as Gareth Pugh’s fetishistic catwalk fashion, Sienna Miller sporting a harness, Dolce & Gabbana’s SM-inspired spring collection and “every second woman on the Tube” wearing boots redolent of female domination. However, it does have a happy ending of sorts, when Marcus finds himself being chatted up by a girl who says she likes to whip men. Not at TG and not in public, you understand — but the writer concludes that he “could, I imagine, arrange to see this girl again”. So it isn’t all just make-believe then.

www.sunday-times.co.uk
www.torturegarden.com

Sign the petition against UK censorship of BDSM!

Despite eloquent opposition from a wide variety of sources including, surprisingly, a number of right-wing newspapers not normally associated with liberal views on kinky sex, the British Government is introducing a bill during the current session of Parliament to outlaw extreme BDSM imagery.

As Fetish Dayz readers who saw my earlier piece (Don’t Look Now — Britain’s Thought Crime) on this subject may recall, the bill, if past in its proposed form, will criminalise thousands of British BDSM enthusiasts simply for looking at images of so-called ‘violent’ porn. Condemned by its many critics as an unwarranted intrusion into the private behaviour of adults, the bill is a blatant attack on the human rights of a sexual minority for whom it is assumed there is not much public sympathy. It is another example of the shameful, knee-jerk, crowd-pleasing legislation the Government has been championing ever since former Home Secretary David Blunkett started proposing laws based on whatever the Daily Mail was complaining about on any given day.

In this case, however, it wasn’t a right wing newspaper that provided the ‘popular’ angle the Government was looking for. It was a campaign by Liz Longhurst, whose daughter Jane had tragically died in an erotic asphyxiation game with Graham Coutts, a man who admitted he was a user of extreme internet porn.

By the Home Office’s own admission there is no causal relationship between viewing violent imagery and committing violent acts. And Coutts’ original conviction for murdering Jane Longhurst was recently overturned by the House of Lords, which said the jury had not been presented with evidence that pointed to the death being unintended. But not wanting to let the facts spoil a good piece of legislation, the Government is going ahead with its bill anyway. Not because it thinks BDSMers who view violent porn will be inspired to commit murder, but because it can’t reach the people it really wants to prosecute, who are the porn producers.

If the law is passed, people in the UK who are found with the ‘wrong’ type of extreme porn images on their hard disks will face three years’ imprisonment and placement on the sex offenders register. Even though, according to leading human rights lawyer Rabinder Singh QC, the proposals appear incompatible with Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights as enshrined in UK law, and it is likely that “an individual will find it difficult to assess under the legislation whether he/she is committing a criminal act by viewing particular material”.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Backlash, the umbrella organisation for UK groups campaigning on BDSM and the law, is urging Brits to sign its petition asking the Prime Minister to abandon plans to make possession of  ‘violent porn’ a criminal offence. It’s really important that as many people as possible do sign, because this is an attack on our personal pervy liberties that needs to be repelled. The online petition can be found here and the deadline for signatures is February 20 2007. So if you want to start the New Year in good fetish grace, you know what to do.

www.backlash-uk.org.uk