Boogie Nights In Suburbia is a revealing documentary about the very distinctive world of British video pornography. Shot stylishly in black and white, it focuses on some of the wild and comic characters who make their living making both hard and soft core sex films in the UK.

PETER and HENRY, porn's Laurel and Hardy, travel the country filming women taking their clothes off (and sometimes performing soft core lesbian sex scenes) in the privacy of their suburban homes. They get lost on the way to an appointment with KIM, who explains that she is doing porn because she likes the attention of men and simply enjoys sex. They move onto MARIA and ALISIA, two young women who sum up the differences between men and women when it comes to porn: "Men are very visual. Women like contact."

BEN DOVER is one of the most successful makers and exporters of hard core porn films to America. He films himself and a 'mate' apparently picking up girl next door-types who he takes back home for sex. And there doesn't seem to be an end to the supply as he constantly receives letters from women with CVs explaining what they are willing to do.

Boogie Nights In Suburbia starts very much as a comedy. Ben has to fly in the award-winning PASCAL a leading Belgian stud for a shoot because he is convinced British men simply ''can't get it up'' in front of the cameras.
People are tired of plastic models faking orgasms. The demand is now for realism and that is exactly what Ben and others provide. Ben has done very well out of porn and his Porsche and Rolex are testimony to this. "The kind of films I make, you can tell people aren't acting at all." DEREK, the publisher, dressed in a sombre, respectable, dark suit speaking from his plush offices in Canary Wharf, confirms this: "It's the girl next door. Mrs T P Wilkinson of Arcadia Avenue taking her clothes off for the viewing public. That's what is really exciting."

MICHAEL is a 'glamour' agent in his 60s who, it transpires, does a profitable sideline in hard core films featuring himself having sex with some of the young girls on his books. He says that the girls do it for the money, because they enjoy it and that coercion does not exist in the business: "It's ludicrous for two reasons. One, nobody has to. What she won't do, she will - the competition is enormous. There is always a girl who will do something that another girl won't do."

Michael meets up with DONNA, fresh from a porn shoot in Spain, who he is booking in to be Pascal's partner the following day. Donna hopes porn will take down the road to fame and fortune. As they prepare for the shoot and Donna unveils herself in suspenders and stockings, Ben and Pascal are openly overcome with excitement.
After the shoot, the film takes a darker turn as it shifts its focus to Michael, the agent, as he welcomes in PENNY, a young woman who has responded to an ad of his in a newspaper. Michael thinks that Penny would be perfect for a magazine called Barely Legal, which contains women who are over 18, but look 15. "I want to give my boys a better life... and I want to be famous."

Once the filmmakers go back with Penny to her home, the desperate poverty in which she lives starts to reveal the stark motivations that propel many young women into the adult film business. She cannot even afford blankets for her children and later she says that she has held onto her self-respect but has lost her pride. "I'm trusting him because he's the only one that's been honest enough. I sense when someone is lying to me and I don't think Michael is - he knows my situation, what my money troubles are."

A BLAST! FILMS Production for Channel Four
Director: Edmund Coulthard
Producer: Adam Barker
Film Editor David G Hill