I once told my sister that I liked an American teen sitcom named Student Bodies. It was being shown, although I can’t quite tell why, on CiTV for a while – mainly on weekend mornings – and she managed to find an episode or two on Nickelodeon; she told me, each time, that Student Bodies was on. I always made an excuse so as to not watch the episode.
The main reason that I didn’t watch any of what my sister found was that I didn’t actually like Student Bodies. In fact, I’d never seen a single episode.
I hope you’re still reading, because it’s time for CONTEXT!
I saw about five minutes of Student Bodies when I was in my mid-teens, having just woken up from a dirty dream (although not a wet dream; I didn’t have many of them). I was still in bed, and likely still hard, and the few minutes of Student Bodies I saw didn’t help much, as it featured multiple attractive teenagers… in particular, two with carefully scripted sexual tension (spoiled somewhat by a pun involving them saying “we’ve got chemistry”).
In my teens, this was something I ached for. Something romantic, but both obvious and blasé; something that would just happen, without any of the pain or heartbreak I seemed to be experiencing daily. It seemed so free, so easy, so effortless. This was what I wanted, and these fictional American teenagers were getting it. I wasn’t going to. Ever.
And I was still in my bed, still hard, and still torn between jealousy and excitement (plus, let’s be real, a fair amount of melancholy) when my sister came into the room and asked why I was watching what she recognised to be Student Bodies. I said I liked it, even though I had no idea what it was, and she latched onto that.
I latched onto the fact that I was turned on when I watched it, but she didn’t need to know that. She still doesn’t know. I don’t really want her to ever know.
But, in case you are reading this, sister of mine… I apologise for misleading you. I’ve never liked Student Bodies. But I do like people being attracted to each other, and even fantasising about it happening to me, and that’s what I was into.
“Do you still have your glockenspiel?” “My crystal glockenspiel? I’ve still got it, yes.” “I keep telling you, it’s not crystal. It’s not even glass; if it was, I’d have credited you with ‘crystallophone’. Anyway, you’ve still got it?” “Yes. I mean, it’s pretty. It’s a talking point. I don’t play it, though.” “Did you ever? I mean, apart from that one time, with the teaspoon?”
[CUT TO: Sixteen years ago. ILB has just been sent some very basic MP3 files containing rough approximations of ad libitum tuned percussion lines. As it turns out, although Louise bought a glockenspiel with glittery, coloured metal bars, she neglected to get any mallets.]
“A few times. I mean, I’m not really a musician, so…” “Neither am I, but I started the band.” “Yeah. I had to return the xylophone, though.” “The one you played with the pencil?”
[CUT TO: Sixteen years ago. Louise has just excitedly sent an e-mail to ILB informing him that she is going to rent a xylophone from a music shop. A day or so later, she further messages him to tell him that she has forgotten to pick up the mallets, but would a pencil work?
ILB doesn’t know, but tells her it can’t hurt to try.]
“Did you know I played that one naked?” “You did what?” “I’d just had a long wank, you see, and it was hot…” “…it’s always hot where you are…” “…and I thought it would be a shame to put anything on, so I just turned my laptop on, and played the xylophone like that.”
[CUT TO: Sixteen years ago. ILB checks the front porch of the house he lives in to find a letter postmarked from South Africa. He finds the sheet he sent to Louise to find her thin, slanting handwriting spelling out her full name. He wonders if she has received the CD yet.]
“Should I edit the CD inlay? Have you credited as playing ‘naked xylophone’?” “I would love you forever if you did that.”
ILB no longer has said CD inlay. But she doesn’t need to know that.
It will always be a mystery to me how we can’t forget the love that forgot us.
jm storm
It’s been ten years, and yet it still doesn’t feel like she’s gone. Every now and again, it feels like she’s still here – about to walk through the door, or maybe she’s in the bed sucking her thumb, or calling me, asking to be read a story. My love right now reminds me of her, and although she is very different in many ways, if you twisted my arm, that may be why I was attracted to her in the first place.
Many people weren’t sure what to make of her. Lots of people saw a short, angry girl with temper issues and an unchecked violent side; while I can see their point, I saw something else in her: someone both intelligent and attractive, frustrated by social protocol and a world that was holding her back.
Sometimes things remind me of her. I have very vivid, unpleasant memories of her doing things that she knew would upset me, and then getting angry at me for being upset. Sometimes she would tell me she didn’t care, or that she was ashamed of me, or that there was something about me that she found unattractive. She told me to “man up”, even though I hate that phrase.
The bad things – the things that hurt, the unresolved, unexplained things that still leave a mark – come to me in my dark moments. At night, when I can’t sleep, I think of things she said to me. I sometimes let out a silent scream into the unforgiving night; I don’t deserve this, I tell myself, so why does it bother me?
When I dream, I often dream of her. In those dreams, we are still together. We’re probably still in our twenties. In nearly every dream, she is cheating, and gleeful about it. I scream and cry and panic, but she just giggles as she skips away to have sex with someone else. In life, the memories make me hurt. In dreams, the hurt comes from any number of hypothetical situations.
I wonder, sometimes, if she feels the same way about me, whether she acknowledges the intricacies and vague lack of explanation that happened at so many points in our love. Once, I asked her if there was anything without closure for her; she said there wasn’t anything. The same couldn’t be said for me, and for ten years, it has been the lack of a why that haunts me. I may not be a logical person, but I need a reason.
I’ll never get one.
Whether or not I’m forgotten, I don’t know. She moved on to something she always wanted, which I couldn’t give her – she married a Dutchman, got the job she wanted and even had a son. She has, in layman’s terms, a normal life, and that’s something she was striving for. Knowing her, I’m very much of the opinion that she has Completely Moved On, and that if I am in her life, I am little more than a faint echo in the distant past.
But I never will. I can make valiant attempts at it, but I never really will move on.
And so I keep the love in my mind… and with it comes all the hurt.
“I’m going to the village,” her mother said, which was probably code for something. The village was a fair walk away, and I’m still not sure entirely whether it was indeed a village. If it was, it was a very big one – or a very small town.
“Okay,” I called through the door. It was all I could do, really, as – at that very moment – I was more concerned with her breasts (I had one in each hand) and her thighs (which were wrapped around my head). You probably get the general idea, although I ought to point out that I heard the door shutting at the exact moment I penetrated her.
The sex was hard and brisk, but lengthy and filthy. Over time it varied – in speed and intensity – but it was what we needed. We had, in all honesty, spent a lot of time having sex; we knew what to do to keep each other satisfied. She certainly was, and on account of the fact that nobody else was in the house at the time, she wasn’t afraid to let the neighbours know, either.
I’ve no idea what had been in my juice box that day. But, as I said, it was a very different world back then.
I hit my peak around about the time she hid her third. With a noise somewhere between a sigh and a scream, I shot rope after rope into her.
One. Two. Three.
[Pause.]
Four.
Click. That was the door closing. We were gazing at each other – her face was flushed into a pleasant state of red, and apparently I was too – and we were glistening with sweat. It was a warm day, certainly, but that probably wasn’t why.
“I’m back!” her mother called. “Welcome back!” I trilled while trying to fix my sex hair before making a public appearance. “How long have you been gone for?” “About an hour?”
…really?
“We just had sex for an hour,” I whispered, slipping back into the bed. “Mmmmmph.” “How do you feel about it?” “Mmmmmph.” “Yeah, me too.”
“Okay, so… I’m just going to go home now,” I said as I stood in her doorway listening to her three children, of indeterminate ages and non-specified gender, chattering away in their bedroom. The door was in fact made of hanging cloth, so it wasn’t difficult to hear.
It had been a weird day to begin with. I had been at university – the third time around – for a month, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I had gotten there, what I was studying, or why my alma mater had been redesigned to look lie my old secondary school. I did know, however, that I was doing another bachelor’s degree (my third), and that the hospital which appeared to be on the same site was somehow integral.
Neither my alma mater nor my secondary school had a hospital attached. My second university did, so maybe that’s where that comes from.
For most of the day, I had been – for want of a better word – panicking. It had just hit me that I was doing something I didn’t need to do in a place I remember disliking so viscerally. I had embarked upon three more years of unnecessary toil while living in a very small room; I didn’t even appear to be doing any work, and had spent a large part of the day walking around mostly empty buildings.
So when she invited me back to her house (which was seemingly a part of the hospital itself; we went down several corridors and through a courtyard to get there), it was a surprise. She had, nominally, invited me over for tea, but I was fairly sure when I got there was that the herbal drink was, although possibly also on offer, code for a good fuck.
In what appears to be the complete antithesis of my real existence, women in my dreams seem to find me very attractive. This one – and I didn’t get her name; she wasn’t based on a real person either – was a woman: mature (maybe in her 40s – I have been feeling confronted by my own age recently and it shows), employed securely, and a mother of three.
So, when I said I would go home, I was just waiting to be invited inside. She did so, and when I stepped in, she was trying to get her three unseen children to go to sleep. It would be easier to have sex with no active children, and there appeared to be no father. I tried to visualise what her bedroom might look like, as I was shortly going to be in it.
This is interesting, I remember thinking. I know it’s wrong. I shouldn’t be here. But it would be nice to have sex with her. A little afternoon treat for the both of us. I don’t need to tell my girlfriend.
Girlfriend. That was interesting. I’d forgotten that I have a girlfriend up until that point.
There’s nothing wrong with this.
And, wouldn’t you know it, it was right then that I got pulled away.
It’s okay, I said to myself; I’ll deal with this, and then I’ll come back. Maybe she’ll still want to have sex with me. Overall, I felt pretty good about it all. If being back at university/school/hospital involved sex with an attractive lady, then I’d be all over that.
That’s the sound of the little bell ringing in the back of your head. Maybe it’s dulled by the accumulation of years surrounding it. Perhaps it rings with a muffled clapper – you recognise the words, but can’t really wring the context out of your brain. You may have even seen this mentioned somewhere – although mentions of the same are very difficult to find – perhaps while trying to find Threesome or Kira Reed’s Easy Guide to Fulfilling Your Fantasies.
But I challenge you, gentle reader, to find anyone who has watched a single episode.
I have, of course. I’ve seen about two or three, but bearing in mind that I was 14 when this was aired, and add to that the fact that one series was made – and one that was never repeated, sold on, or renewed (and no clips are on the Internet – I’ve looked!) – and you may have to forgive me for my memories being a little hazy.
I’ll do my best.
So what is it?
L!VE TV‘s Blonde, Busty, & Keane (which is the correct spelling, complete with Oxford comma and ampersand) does, indeed, exist; although it isn’t mentioned in the official L!VE TV prospectus, an IMDb listing exists, as does a brief mention on GitHub!
I believe this may be the title sequence. I can’t recall any other L!VE TV programme that used this.
It is, effectively, a spy caper series starring Jane Blonde (porn star Katie Ann Day) and Tracey Keane (actress Madeleine Curtis), two attractive young ladies employed as secret agents by spymaster Busty Farquar (Annabel Rivkin – I’m assuming not the same Annabel Rivkin who writes for ES Magazine et al, but you never know, she might be!). Written and shot by L!VE themselves in and around their Canary Wharf headquarters, and directed by John Wolskel (who went on to write horror movies), Blonde, Busty, & Keane lasted for one series.
Eight episodes, aired between September and October 1999.
What’s different about it?
The gimmick here – if one can call it a gimmick – is that it bills itself as an erotic series. It isn’t – there isn’t any actual sex in it, and the sex there is is always done quickly and with clothes on – but, at the very least, it was shown during the L!VE Late 10pm slot and contained what can best be termed “a moderate amount of nudity”.
I’m really selling this to you, I can tell.
One prominent example I can think of is a scene in which Blonde and Keane get stuck in a skip – it’s not meant to be, but it’s genuinely a skip – full of… something meant to trap them, I guess. Blonde manages to activate a hitherto-unmentioned explosive device in Keane’s bra, which manages to effect their escape as well as render Keane topless for the next few minutes.
There is, even, a continuing plot with a recurring villain – Baron Schwanzer (Alan Blyton) – and, if my memory serves me correctly, several side characters including a stereotypical Frenchman complete with beret, stripy hat and garlic necklace. Busty, while busty, is never particularly involved in the action and never once removes her business suit.
I also can’t really say much for the storylines, but as far as I can remember, they are a mess.
So what was the point?
It’s difficult to tell.
From a young ILB’s memory, Blonde, Busty, & Keane seemed to have had a lower budget than other homegrown series like Threesome. Sets were small (I suspect mostly built in the office in One Canada Square), plots were threadbare, characters had no character, and in addition to having nothing that could reasonably be termed a ‘sex scene’, what nudity there was was both brief and non-sexy.
14-year-old ILB wasn’t difficult to turn on. Practically everything else did, but I remember being both bored and confused by this. I genuinely don’t remember ever being once titillated, amused or intrigued by any part of this programme, which probably explains why I only remember watching it twice.
Exotica Erotica was on afterwards, so that’s probably why.
Is there anything positive to say about it?
I’ll skip past the ‘strong women doing heroic stuff’ tag, because this doesn’t really exemplify this. Bikini Avengers is right there, my dudes.
For all its flaws, Blonde, Busty, & Keane is an example of both what not to do with an erotic spy story (ie. no sex; limited nudity; no plot) and what to do with a very limited budget (ie. use what you have for scenery; small cast; inventive use of outdoor props).
Katie Ann Day on “The Sex Show” promoting it.
It even had a bit of promotion, with Day appearing on L!VE’s The Sex Show talking about it and a trailer made (which sadly I can’t find anywhere; it has an MST3K-like set up with silhouetted men in a cinema), before quietly disappearing into the netherworld.
ILB’s Extra Bit
This post was originally planned to be a deep dive into Blonde, Busty, & Keane with all the resources I could find, but realistically, there are no resources. Vague references aside, there’s very little evidence that this programme ever existed, and while the cynical side of me wants to think that MGN (who owned the channel) buried it somewhere quiet and dark, the realistic side of me rationalises that it was quickly realised they had produced something that proved not to be marketable, and pulled it.
The same slot that aired Blonde, Busty, & Keane was also used for imports of short-form American programmes like Compromising Situations and Love Street; this is what it went back to shortly after the aforementioned show stopped running.
What is confusing, however is why it appears to be completely expunged from televisual history. It was certainly filmed once, and aired once. Cable television proved to be difficult to record from on VHS (I certainly failed to get any of Knightmare from Sci-Fi), but this is the sort of thing that someone would record, surely?
“So what are you going to do?” asked my pretty young colleague as we were walking together to the gate (she has a fob to get out; I don’t). “This weekend, I mean?” “You first?” “I mean… nothing, really. I’ll play some games. Did I mention my boyfriend lent me his Nintendo Switch?”
I did remember, mostly on account of the fact that she spent fifteen minutes rhapsodising about New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (and I agree with her; it’s very much a love letter to Nintendo’s history) earlier in the day.
“So what are you going to do?” “Well, I’ve got this meeting tonight, and then for the rest of the weekend I’ll… I’ll…”
And then I just… stopped.
What was I going to do? An eternal question, perhaps, and one for which I genuinely didn’t have an answer. What was I going to do? As much as I’ve gotten to know my pretty young colleague over the past three weeks, I’m fairly certain that “I’m going to sit at my computer, read sex blogs and perhaps play the tile-matching game that lets you see boobs, oh, and I’ll lie in bed doing nothing at all because I am a millennial and that’s what we do” wasn’t exactly the most appropriate, or stimulating, answer I could have given.
What was I going to do?
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there wasn’t really much that I could say I did. There are multiple micro-actions, of course; today I sorted out money for rent, charged my iPod (and, in doing so, put two more albums on it because I can), deleted some e-mails, read a bit of one of the graphic novels I got for my birthday… and now I’m sitting here writing in my blog.
Part of me likes the tedium, of course. Drinking tea…
[pause while ILB actually goes to make himself a cup of tea]
…and doing very little reminds me of much simpler times, times where I could sit in my bedroom at home, watch porn, write my blog and read fantasy novels at bedtime. In order to give my pretty young colleague an accurate answer, I’d have to say something nebulous like “I’m going to do a rough emulation of what I used to do, only with adult responsibilities now and a fair amount more back pain”.
I do wonder, however, if the most suitable response to her question would be something like…
“…just be?”
Because I never have time for that. If I’m at work, I’m too busy. If I’m at home and the TV’s on, it’s too loud. If it’s late, I’m too tired. If it’s early, I’m too tired. And, frankly, if I’m thinking about all the things that I need to do, it’s too much.
But right now, it is quiet. I have my tea, and I have my blog, and I’m alone, and the only sound I can hear is the soft tap of my fingertips against the keyboard.
So, for now, I don’t need to be doing anything this weekend. Right here, right now, I’m content to just be.
About a week or so ago, I made an international call to someone who doesn’t like speaking on the telephone. I knew this was risky – and her fear of a disembodied voice proved to be an issue the last time I saw her in person (to the point of her masturbating in the same room as me, so she wasn’t distracted by any noises I made) – but this was, to put it mildly, important.
I had something to say, and I wanted to do so without preamble… but then, what kind of friend would I be had I done that?
“Er, yeah, hello, this is ILB,” I said hesitantly. “I’m sorry for calling, I know you don’t like it very much. And it’s an international call, so I’ll have to be brief.” “What’s this, a booty call?” “Uh…” I looked around at this point, the grey work building I had ducked out of at lunchtime surrounding me like three looming monoliths. I couldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, think of a place less designed to be making a booty call. “No, it’s not an 8,419-mile booty call. What it is is…” “So it’s not a booty call?”
In all fairness, it’s not out of the realms of possibility for Louise to genuinely travel eight and a half thousand miles for sex. I’m fairly certain she’s done more.
“…and that’s why I think you need to check your e-mails. Do you still use that old address?” “No, but I have the password for it. I mean, I used to use it for…” “Sex,” I supplied. “You had a directory of people you liked to bang; do I have that correct?”
There were a few seconds of silence before she burst into a loud, wheezy laugh.
“Well, I can hardly use my work e-mail for that!” “You can’t?”
Another wheezy laugh. I’d forgotten how breathless she sounds when she’s amused. Something else which slipped my mind in the intervening seventeen years.
“Okay, I’ll check. I’ll e-mail you what I find out.” “Cheers. You’re okay with e-mailing me everything, yeah?” “You tell me. How much of me do you want?”
What?
“What?” “You’re the one that made the booty call!”
During the week a local councillor was suspended from the Green Party of England and Wales for transphobia. As co-chair of the GPEW’s “Women’s Group”, she made the “unremarkable factual observation that transwomen are not female” (not my words). She was ousted from her position for this.
Kathryn Bristow, her co-chair, is a transwoman – or, as the co-ordinator for the Bridgwater Green Party puts it, “a man who wishes to be identified as a woman”. The GPEW councillor in Sunderland weighed in on this, including sentences like this:
“I have witnessed female colleagues issued with death threats and threats of rape by trans rights activists, so in comparison, I have only had a small taste of this vile behaviour.”
gpew sunderland councillor
The prevailing wisdom in the under echelons of the GPEW is that, despite the fact that we passed a gender self-ID motion at Conference, trans people (and, more specifically, M-to-F transwomen) are dangerous to women and children. Pink News reports on this story here.
Yesterday I received an e-mail from my local Green Party (of which I am still a paying member) in which the writer, a party contact, said this:
As a party that claims/seeks to respect science it is outrageous that someone has been suspended for saying that transwomen are not female. Firstly, it’s true. Transwomen have XY chromosomes, the definitive marker for male sex.
local green party contact
He followed this up by saying that “telling the truth is, for [him], a matter of conscience.” So I did the same.
My e-mail read thus:
Much as I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this, I am astounded that this sort of viewpoint exists within the GPEW and maybe even some fringes of [my local GP].
Transphobia is not, in any way, an acceptable point of view, and as much as it can be an ‘accidental’ prejudice, it is nevertheless a prejudice, and both dangerous and damaging in every imaginable way, comparable to racism, sexism and homophobia. I have already had my issues with whorephobia (SWERFism) in the GPEW; on this issue, however, I am not content to be silent.
First of all, although ‘sex’ is biologically defined by chromosomes at birth, ‘gender’ is a social construct, and often weaponised. As a cisgender male, I’ve been subjected to “boys don’t cry” narratives (occasionally with those exact words); the recent tragic death of Sarah Everard has added weight to the right-wing media’s “girls are weak” and/or “need protection by men from men” sort of thing. All these viewpoints are damaging. They are insulting. They do not help. They also promote gender stereotypes which we should be working to eliminate.
We should not be focusing on ‘protect our daughters’, rather ‘educate our sons’. However, it is equally important to acknowledge that not everyone is a daughter or a son.
As a social construct, and as a matter of consent, gender is intrinsically flexible and changeable, and it is the individual’s right to make that decision (as many times as they wish; gender identity can be switched at any time, and as there are more than two genders in existence, this decision can be made multiple time), it is incredibly dangerous to label someone as one gender, especially if they have explicitly said they identify as another. If you are uncertain, it is possible to just ask someone what their gender identify and/or preferred pronouns are; neither question is offensive.
It is grossly offensive to call someone who identifies as a woman ‘a man’ or ‘male’. This is a genuine insult and has no place in acceptable, moral discourse. Trans people have suffered under the pressures of societal norms for far too long (and they shouldn’t have suffered to begin with). The right-wing press label trans activists as unnatural; they are seen with suspicion or unwarranted curiosity for the simple act of not being cis, or hetero, or both, or either. Even at an inclusive event, trans people are often singled out – a lesbian activist group at Pride in London came under fire for handing out anti-trans leaflets, saying that transwomen are not women. Jess Phillips MP recently read out a list of “women and girls” in Parliament, purported to be a list of all female victims of violence, but excluding all transwomen, who weren’t on the list as its author considers them to be ‘not real women’.
Do you have any idea how insulting this is?
It’s been said at some point that the GPEW is tying itself in knots about trans rights when we should instead be focusing on the climate emergency (and we should, but we are not a single-issue party and I would urge us not to become so). But we shouldn’t be. It is not an issue to be debated, it is a simple fact:
Trans women are women Trans men are men Some people don’t have a gender Gender is something you identify yourself
and
TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
and I will not stand by while anyone says anything different. Come at me if you will, but everything I have said above is correct.
ilb (he/him)
I make no apology for anything I said in the above. I joined the GPEW in 2010 because I saw it as an inclusionist, radical left-wing party and this is the first time I have been genuinely shaken by something somebody in the party has said (even if it goes against party policy).
I am sharing this on my blog because I feel that it needs to be highlighted before the press gets their hands on this story.
I am not resigning from the GPEW, but I plan to challenge these damaging and transphobic views in my local party’s upcoming AGM. I will, of course, update you with anything else that arises from this.
It is, to use the common parlance, about bloody time. I’m aware some people have been off work for much longer, but – as much as I complain about it – unemployment does not suit me. I’d be happy sitting at home drinking tea and playing HuniePop, with the occasional foray into sex blogging, but I need the routine and innate satisfaction that my chosen industry gives me.
Before you ask, no, I’m not in porn. I’m also no longer an actor. But still.
Like most other things in my life, this came along basically by chance. I got the call last week, and this week has been effectively a trial week. I was told I’d get more work this morning while making the coffee that’s been sustaining me.
When I mentioned the workplace a couple of weeks ago, my mother (who has the same sort of mental Rolodex as I do) instantly mentioned somebody I haven’t thought of for years. She had worked there too, and might have been able to give me some information. Did I want her contact number?
What my mother doesn’t know is that I already have her contact number.
For a while – and when I say “a while” I’m referring to the fact that I’m not entirely sure how long – I was sort-of-kind-of trying to date her. My mother, who had seen her crying at work and felt her parenting instincts kick in, invited her around for dinner at one point and I promptly spent the entire evening flirting being friendly. A month or so later, we went to see my mother in concert together (she was in a wind orchestra for a while); after filling up with millionaire’s shortbread, we exchanged numbers.
I wasn’t sure where to go from this point. I was recently out of a relationship and didn’t really know how to ask someone out (long-term readers may remember that I don’t). But, after weeks of dithering and indecision, my dad – who is a wizard – told me to ask her out.
But I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to do that, so I asked my mother to ask her if she would like to get a coffee with me at some point. Mother reported back that coffee sounded nice, and to just text her to ask.
Which is, incidentally, what I should have done to begin with.
We never did go for a coffee. Our available dates didn’t match up, and the one time they did, she had a death in the family during the preceding week. She eventually moved into a relationship, as did I, and what we were left with was a distant friendship.
So I got in contact with her. Her cheery voice shines through her texts – in every letter. Her use of emoji radiant. Her positive attitude infections. By my second day at work, I felt confident in dropping her name. Everyone has something positive to say about her. Everyone says hello, so I have more excuses to continue texting.