Hang on a minute, let’s just work this out. Say, for argument’s sake we took a good month and porn mags made a million sales (as it makes it easier to work out). There were 60 million people living in Great Britain, half of them were fellas. Now say the average life expectancy for blokes in the UK was three score and ten and let’s just say that no one under the age of 18 ever bought a mag because they’re not able to. Alright, so 52 as a percentage of 70 was just over 74 per cent (I’m using a calculator now so don’t get too impressed) and 74 per cent of 30 million was... hang on I pressed the wrong key... was 22,200,000. That’s just over 22 million blokes of nudey mag-buying age. Let’s knock the pensioners off that total, because they probably weren’t up to it anyway and get it down to a manageable 20 million. That meant that on average, one in every twenty blokes in this country regularly went down the newsagents (or in my case the 24hr service station at midnight) and bought a dirty mag every month. One in twenty. With such a common phenomenon going on around us all the time you’d think you’d see more blokes buying them, wouldn’t you? I’d seen a badger once but to this day I’ve never seen anyone walk out of the newsagents with a dirty mag under his arm; mind you I’d seen plenty of people walking out of the newsagents with a suspiciously thick The Exchange and Mart under their arms.
It suddenly felt good to know that it wasn’t just me buying them.
‘Yep, people are always surprised how many we sell,’ Stuart said. ‘We’re like the Masons, in a way.’
‘Yeah, you both have your secret handshakes, I suppose,’ I replied, but I didn’t get the laugh I was looking for.
We carried on walking up the corridor, past offices on either side, then 20 yards later through a big pair of double doors and into a large open-plan editorial office. There were no pictures of the New York skyline in here, nor were there any copies of The New Statesman (that I could see), the place was wall to wall with pin-ups, posters and polaroids. Great piles of mags overflowed by the side of every desk and boxes of mags, videos and slides were heaped on top of a large bank of filing cabinets against the far wall. There was even a shelf close-by with something like a dozen dildos laid out like a weapons rack.
It was an Aladdin’s cave of porn.
‘This is where we work,’ Stuart told me while I gaped about. ‘All four mags are done in this room and there’s probably about...’ quickly started counting up under his breath, ‘about a dozen of us who work in here, although it’s a bit early so no one’s in yet.’
I looked at my watch, it was 10.30am and there were three people sat about reading the newspapers and Harry Potter. 10.30am and a bit early? Fuck me I wanted a job in this place, didn’t I?
‘Everyone’s got phones, most of the iMacs have got email and pretty much everyone’s on the net.’
‘I bet this is about the only place in London you wouldn’t get sacked for looking at porn on the internet all day isn’t it?’ I thought out loud.
‘It’s probably the only place in London where nobody wants to,’ he replied, making me feel stupid. I made a mental note to stop with the witty insights and shut my gob. ‘Alright, well that’s it really, just thought I’d show you the offices. Usual procedure from here on in now, we’re going to do a quick interview in one of the rooms back there and then I’ll give you a subbing test and then we’ll see how you get on with it. Right, this way then.’
I followed Stuart back down the corridor and into a large but sparsely furnished office. There was a big table in the middle of the room with half a dozen chairs around it and a computer set up at one end. This was much more like the sorts of interviews I’d come to know and hate.
‘Take a seat,’ he said, indicating to one side of the table as he slid in behind the other. He plucked several copies of Bling off the shelf behind himself and laid them on the table in front of me. One of them I already had at home, but the other two I didn’t. I wondered if he’d let me take them with me.
‘This is our mag, as you probably now. Lots of girls...’ he said, flipping through it in front of me, making me blush inwardly, ‘... a few features, funny stuff, lads type stuff. A few sporty things...’ he was saying and I tried nodding along as if I’d even noticed one of his funny lads/sporty features/things ever before, ‘... lots of readers’ letters, true confessions, stuff like that... a shit load of adverts at the back you won’t have to worry about and that’s about that,’ he finished and turned it over to me. ‘Questions?’
‘Are the true confessions really true?’
‘I doubt it. They’re all written by a regular contributor, and if you saw the state of her you’d wonder if she’d ever had it in her life. We just change her name every month. The readers’ letters are all genuine, well, you know, we get real letters in, I can’t remember if these are genuine or not,’ he said staring down at the page in front of me. ‘They need subbing, which’ll be your job,’ he said in a way that made me think I’d already got it. ‘That and you’ll have to write the funnies and the reviews and the girl blurbs and, well basically every word in here that isn’t sent in by a contributor or an advert. See what I mean, it’s a lot of work.’
‘What’s girl blurb?’ I asked.
‘These bits, by each of the girl sets.’ Stuart opened up to a page showing some tall slender blonde bird rolling around in a stable, butt-arse naked, and indicated to a few paragraphs of text and a pull-out quote up in one corner of the picture.
‘What I’ll have to interview the girls?’ I said, hopefully.
‘Be a bit fucking difficult,’ he replied, flipping through the mag. ‘She’s Hungarian. This one’s Czech. So’s she. She’s Estonian. This one’s Russian and this one’s from Wolverhampton, so none of them speak English. No, you just look at the pictures and get a feel for the set. Maybe look up a few back issues if they’ve been in before and then write a few words as to what you imagine they would be saying, if asked the right questions.’
‘Imagine,’ I mused, quickly reading the girl in the barn’s fantasy about taking shelter out of a storm and getting done in both ends by a couple of wandering farm hands while the horses watched.
‘Yeah, you know, make it up. We got you to do some before and send them in, stuff like that.’
‘Oh right,’ I replied and tried to hide my disappointment. I’d always thought the girls had said these things themselves. Had I bashed off to something some geezer like me had written in the past?
‘Right, so why do you want to work for Bling?’ Stuart asked, looking across the table at me.
‘Well, I think it would be great working with naked birds all day and getting sucked off left, right and centre,’ I obviously didn’t say, although if you’ve ever been for a job on a porn mag this is your motivation. Don’t pretend it’s not.
‘Well,’ I started, wondering how the hell I was going to answer this. I’d known about my interview for a few days now and had been dreading this question and I still hadn’t come up with anything convincing. ‘I’ve always been interested in fashion.’
‘What’s that got to do with porn?’ Stuart asked, making me backpedal frantically
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing at all. As for working here, I just thought it would be a bit of laugh, that’s all. I work in a very stuffy office at the moment and I just think that perhaps it would be nice to work somewhere fun for a change,’ I said and half-expected him to tell me that this was a serious business, not Alton Towers, but luckily he didn’t.
‘Yes, it can be alright,’ he admitted. It was about the best answer I could’ve given. If I’d told him I’d always been fanatical about porn and that it had been my lifelong ambition to work in the industry, I doubt I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I mean, who wants to work with someone who’s frothing at the bit about being surrounded by dirty mags all day long. Pretty unsettling, no. Same as Mr Kipling; how would he fancy some thirty stone lard arse working in his cake factory?