Soho video shops: On their death bed?

[Jock Strap]

I like the Harmony store in Soho.
But it's true......go to Amsterdam and the DVDs are dirt cheap.

[Officer Dibble]

"Hustler, Seymore Butts etc is disappeared, and Diabolic/Anabolic and even Rocco films are going the same way, whilst i'm sure there are others in this direction. Private films are still there but it seems to be either old stuff or the same old old with their films, which is a damn shame as they have a great huge catalogue which includes Castings etc (which you hardly see ever now)."

A while back I heard that Hustler had closed down their mega sized adult store in Birmingham - which is not something you do if business is booming. It seems that at a time when the adult DVD and Internet markets are all but saturated, punters (Joe Average) are losing interest. It's the old sweetshop syndrome, never mind any of that old nonsense about UK satellite, as much porn as you could possibly watch in a lifetime is available to almost anyone at any time - via euro satellite, mail order DVD, internet downloads, and dodgy Dave down the boot sale. Punters are sated and contemporary porn is all pretty horrid anyway so, apart from the 'committed' few, no one is really gagging for it anymore. It?s not a question of price, either. Porn is not like the mundane items that we buy every week. At it?s most potent it?s almost like a drug ? if you gotta have it, you gotta have it. Within the bounds of reason price is immaterial.

And why bother with porn anyway? Casual sex is far more acceptable and prevalent than it was in ?the olden days?, when I was a lad. Just checkout some of these Internet Dating sites. I joined one, and although geezers vastly outnumber ladies on ?no strings? sites, there have been a number of occasions when a big titted lady has e-mailed me out of the blue at 11.00 AM and by 3.30 PM she is rolling round starkers on my Persian, smoking my beef! I?m tellin? ya, it?s true? I mean, it?s just no contest, is it? ? A skanky DVD featuring some charmless chavs sucking some chortling spotty git's knob in a Lay-by - or shagging a puka/classy/neglected/nympho housewife in the comfort of your own home, for free? No wonder the cheery chaps of England are not forming queues outside their local sex stores. They?ve got better things to do.


Officer Dibble

[Jock Strap]

Er.....Dibble,

Next time you're done shagging a puka/classy/neglected/nympho housewife in the comfort of your own home........would you give her my contact details please?
There's a good Dibble.

[Mysteryman]

"pradaboy", who I can only assume is too young to know better says:

"Maybe the older guys who are set in there ways still like to visit a shop but the main consumer of porn now are guys in the late teens and twenties."

Says who? Where does he get his figures from?

He fails to realise that there are areas in these islands where broadband is still not available (apart from horrendously expensive satellite broadband) and there are people around who are very suspicious of entrusting their credit card number to a supplier outside the UK - however "well known" the supplier is - due to problems of contact when things go wrong, potential problems of misrepresentation of product and the worst problem, rip off sites purporting to be someone they are not,(remember there have been "copy cat" bank web sites which have attempted to drain people's accounts by purporting to be genuine and then lifting account numbers and passwords).

The ban on posting R18 DVDs from the UK is censorship imposed by the moral inferiority and is typical of the "Britishness" we are all so proud of.

[DanG]

You've hit the nail firmly on the head there, David...sadly it's all too true!

Perhaps the industry needs to set up a lobby group to campaign for these law changes and allow British adults to be treated as such?

[Terry_S]

When I first bought videos in Soho, guys in tiny shops sold VHS copies. The first one I bought cost me ?25. Sometimes, I'd get the video home and it wouldn't even work properly.

Later on, some stores opened where you could browse the video boxes and buy copies that were the advertised film and worked when you got home. They cost ?20 and could be exchanged for ?10.

Later still, places opened and sold non-pirated videos for the same price. I remember the first one I bought was Dirty Anal Kelly in Rome.

Now, whenever I go into a Soho porn shop, I see a load of films I can dowload overnight from VideoBox or similar.

I can't see myself buying a porn DVD from a UK store ever again.

[Ikhan]

can't disagree with many points here, but in the US and Europe their shops don't seem to be on the way down the way ours are. The stock is large and diverse, surely here in london we can do the same.

[DanG]

Don't forget that most of the major store chains are also the major licensors and/or distributors of US/Euro movies in the UK, thus they have very little call to stock anyone else's product, especially those of their erstwhile competitors.

The quasi-monopoly that has sprung up because of our archaic laws doesn't help anyone, least of all the punter. As Terry says, you're probably better off downloading, but the next wave is going to be the download-to-burn service....you get the DVD and all the extras without having to leave the comfort of your own home (copy protected, of course). Vivid are currently doing it, as well as JM Productions and no doubt a few others besides.