Once more, with feeling

By Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton

Vicky and Charlie, twenty-somethings, one the son of a vicar, the other the daughter of a much loved Radio 4 and Times columnist, friends for years but never boyfriend/girlfriend, decide to make a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1841154377
• ISBN13: 9781841154374
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Friends Find Adventures in the Porn Trade

What are we to make of pornography? Or, if you are Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton, how are we to make pornography? Well, first you have to know your subject. Vicky and Charlie are best friends from Oxford days, and landed the tandem job of reviewing pornographic films for the London periodical _The Erotic Review_. Hard at work on the sofa, sipping tea and munching cookies while the tape of _Rocco's Anal Ski Vacation_ spooled out, they found a contradiction compared to how such a film is usually viewed: they were paying attention to the dialogue and plot, and fast forwarding through the sex scenes. They were both professional writers, and they convinced themselves that they could do the job better than in any film they had critiqued. They didn't know anything about making movies, and they didn't know anything about making porn, but they knew what they liked. However, what would family, friends, and hypothetical future spouses think? That was a worry. "Then again, it might be fun. And you only get one life. So what the hell - let's go ahead and ruin it." The adventures of Vicky and Charlie as they carried out this task are delightfully told in _Once More, With Feeling: How We Tried to Make the Greatest Porn Film Ever_ (Fourth Estate), a hilarious memoir that is explicit but also humane and endearing. Those likely to be offended by the subject matter won't find much to enjoy here, but only the naughtiest of that group will be opening these pages. (But we should not make assumptions about who fits into this category. Charlie's father, for instance is a vicar, and one evening while Reverend Skelton was looking for his seed catalogue to read in bed, the bomb was dropped as to what Charlie had been spending the previous months doing. "Goodness me," he replied, "I hope it'll earn you some money. Have you seen my Sutton's catalogue? I had it a minute ago.") For the rest of us, this is an amiable, brightly told, jocular, and surprisingly wholesome account by two friends who know how to amuse themselves and the reader. After forming the goal of making such a film, the next step was to get a book deal, not a movie deal. This is just the thing for comic writers, just like travel writers. Put the tyros into a strange new world and let them write all about it. Fourth Estate invested wisely. The money commenced outflow on a trip to Las Vegas to write the script; "Porn needs to be written in a porny place." They booked into the Excalibur Hotel, with its theme of Merrie Olde England, and cooked up their plot. But it is in seeking inspiration at the pyramidal Luxor Hotel that they find a villain while they take a 3D amusement ride "chased round the pyramids by the evil Dr Reginald Osiris in the sort of flying car that was very popular in 3000 BC." Dr Osiris became the evil uncle of the plot of Vicky and Charlie's movie, a plot full of nefarious, bumbling, or beneficent uncles who are complicating the lives of a boy and girl twin who