Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton: Adventures in pornography

Whatever pornographers are supposed to look like, it isn't like Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton. Seated on the sofa of Coren's pleasant north London flat, Coren and Skelton are a fresh-faced duo in their 20s; Coren, the journalist daughter of humourist Alan Coren, is happy to describe herself as a "nice middle-class girl", while comic writer Skelton is a Suffolk vicar's son and theology graduate.

Yet together they are responsible for "The Naughty Twins", a porn film shot in Amsterdam and containing numerous scenes of kinky sex within what is surely the most ludicrous plot ever to grace the top shelf--a chivalric quest to recover a dildo on which rests the fate of the universe. Fourth Estate publishes the story of Coren and Skelton's escapade in making "The Naughty Twins", Once More with Feeling (£10.99, tpb, 1841154369), on 5th September.

It all began when the two friends took on the task of reviewing hardcore porn films for the Erotic Review, a job they found hard to carry out because they spent much of the time convulsed with laughter.

From there sparked the idea of making their own porn film. "We thought we just want to make a film that's better than all the rubbish that we've seen, something that women can enjoy as much as men, something with a bit of comedy in it, with proper dialogue and a narrative, and also lots of fascinating sex--not just monotonous rutting, but lots of exciting things with psychological quirks," explains Coren with an infectious enthusiasm.

They were also curious to define their own views on porn, explains Skelton. "We started out in a state of complete ignorance. All we knew was that society's party line was that porn is made by bad people, women are degraded in it, it's exploitative, bad and wrong, and people get hurt and lives get ruined. But without really knowing anything, we hoped that wasn't inevitably the case, and also thought, 'It can't be.'"

They started "The Naughty Twins" by making a list of all the sex acts they wanted or didn't want in their film (spanking and whipping were in, nipple clamps were out), and Skelton produced a wild and wonderful script involving innocent young twins, evil uncles, a sexy nurse, a tormented priest, and plenty of scenes in dungeons.

Given his academic background, he also couldn't resist putting in a bit of theological debate: "I thought, this is the only chance I'm going to get to make a film in my life, here's a chance to write 'Paradise Lost'! The priest makes a great long sermon, and smacks the girl twins' buttocks with a volume of Thomas Aquinas."

Then Coren and Skelton went off to the San Fernando valley, the centre of the mainstream porn industry in America, to pick up some tips. They were adamant from the start that they had no interest in going anywhere near the darker fringes of the industry: this was strictly a look at the legitimate mainstream of the business. And in California, their experience was rather positive.

"We went to the film that happened to be shooting that week, and it had a female director and a female producer, and the next day we went to the health centre to talk about counselling and AIDS testing, and that was run by a woman too," says Coren. "A lot of the women who were big stars in what they call the golden age of porn, the 1970s and 80s, moved on to become directors and producers and now have a lot of power in the industry, which makes things very different. They tend to be kinder and more respectful."

Comically enough, Coren and Skelton, being repressed British types, are actually rather shy and embarrassed about sex. But on their first day on a porn set they soon found themselves coping remarkably well. "It was only for the first two minutes that there was anything alarming about it at all," explains Coren. "Really, it's such a normal atmosphere, you'd be amazed. You walk in and your brain says, 'Oh my God, those people are having sex'-- and five minutes later you're thinking, 'I might go and get a bagel.' The actors are just being professional and it's quite cheery and sunny."

Now with a little experience under their belts, it was time for the big adventure of their own film. They went to Amsterdam, hired some actors--a ramshackle mix of porn veterans, wannabes and prostitutes prepared to branch out--and started directing sex scenes.

Their worries about asking the actors doing anything they were unhappy with turned out to be mostly unnecessary: "We were blushing terribly and saying, 'Would you mind doing that?', and they were saying, 'No, and we'll also do that, that and that.'"

But if Coren and Skelton bent over backwards to run an ethical porn set--paying above the going rate and insisting on AIDS tests for participants--even they, with their amateur status and no need to make a profit, came up against one or two difficult ethical moments.

Coren explains: "With the dungeon sequence, we thought, 'Right, let's have a bit of exciting S&M stuff here, we're going to manacle these twins in a dungeon', and we had our box of props that we'd excitedly bought from charity shops and thought we'd have whipping and caning and all this stuff you read about in the News of the World. But when it came to it we were in a dungeon with Michael and Alexis, our leading actors, who were very good friends of ours at that stage, and Alexis had a bit of a cold, and Michael was worrying about his asylum application. We thought, 'There's no way on earth we are going to whip these people!' So we just said, 'Oh, we'll fake it.'"

Coren and Skelton are proud of the final version of "The Naughty Twins," although they accept it might leave the average porn viewer a little baffled. They hope though that a nice middle-class couple might find it an enjoyable watch before retiring to bed together for the night.

"We gave ourselves a pat on the back at the end of it, we reassured ourselves that the two years we spent watching pornography for the Erotic Review was not two years spent contributing to the moral decline of the human race," says Coren. "Of course there are people out there doing terrible things in pornography, just as there are in almost every business, but it's certainly possible to do it in a way in which no one gets hurt and you're not doing anything bad to the viewer--although bad viewers can always use it the wrong way."

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