From Sam Wollaston, this article from the UK’s Guardian newspaper:
Picture, if you wouldn’t mind, a shop that sells magazines and a section labelled “Watersports”. You’re probably thinking windsurfing titles, some about jetskiing, a few copies of Motor Boats Monthly, aren’t you? Me too.
But we were probably imagining the shop to be something like WHSmith. But Simply Pleasures in Soho is nothing like WHSmith, and here watersports have nothing to do with jetskis. A member of the Metropolitan police vice unit, who’s having a little undercover snoop about the place, explains. “The act of someone urinating on to someone else would contravene the Obscene Publications Act,” he whispers to a hidden camera. “But there’s also a genre out there where it just follows women round and they just urinate in the street, which doesn’t contravene the Obscene Publications Act. So although at first we see ‘watersports’ we think ‘hmmm, it could break the law’, as you can see from some of these titles, it is literally women urinating on to the floor . . . There’s nothing here to worry about really.”
Nothing to worry about? Ladies peeing on the floor? Call me a prude, but I do find that a little worrying. And also not very nice for the other people who might be using the floor for more innocent pursuits. But he’s talking about it from a legal point of view, and the law says that peeing on other people and putting it in a magazine or a video is a no-no, but peeing on the floor is fine.
I’m learning a lot from Vice Squad (A TV documentary shown on Five), which follows this special unit of the Met as they go about their business. Harnesses, paddles, dildos the size of prize-winning marrows – they’re all fine, nothing to worry about. But a video about Paloma the Transsexual Midget – that’s not allowed and contravenes the Obscene Publications Act. And chaps should be really careful about being coaxed into basements by outwardly friendly and scantily dressed ladies, possibly from eastern Europe. They’ll say one thing on the door, but once they’ve got you down there, it all changes very quickly and you’ll be introduced to a very large man whose sole purpose is to extract large sums of money from you. If you don’t have it on you, he’ll frogmarch you to a cashpoint to get it. Look, it very nearly happens to this guy here, until he makes a run for it – and he’s an undercover cop, one of the vice squad. God, I thought Soho was all nice Italian cafes and edit suites these days, but it seems that under the shiny facade it’s basically still Hogarth.
They seem to be doing a good job, these special cops – closing down clip joints, confiscating the watersports stuff, as well as keeping a check on the women who work there, treating them as the victims, offering them an escape route if they need it. But, hell, they can be irritating too. “If you’re here and you’re ashamed, maybe you shouldn’t be here,” one of them says to a man who’s been caught with his trousers down. Ooh, that must be horrid – a lecture in morality from a copper.
A couple of 14-year-old girls out on the lash agree. “Police are wankers. You’re going to rot in fucking hell,” they sing in the back of the police van. That’s the mild stuff, because other bits are beeped out. They’ve had their faces pixellated too, because of their age. Just about everyone in this film has had their face pixellated, because they’re young, or a sex worker, or an undercover police officer. So everyone is walking around with a fuzzy head; it’s like they’ve all got hangovers.