This after recounting how she felt odd even at the time appearing at her mother’s behest in a mother and daughter topless shoot “so that Dad could have the photo”. There was Debee Ashby crying as she remembered driving away from it all at 19, able only now to understand that “16 was too young to go into the industry”. Tales hinting at the darkness round the edges of the superstars’ spotlit world were spread thinly through the hour
“Sexually assaulted her” you might argue now. “Groped her” we would have said back then, children. There was the mighty Sam Fox recalling the time David Cassidy followed her into the loo after a shoot (at which he was “excited – I don’t really need to say more than that”) and … I don’t know. Most of the former models had happy memories – the money, the glamour, the excitement, the escape from ordinary and sometimes impoverished lives. And we revisit the 80s greats – Samantha Fox’s, Maria Whittaker’s, Debee Ashby’s – and the originals’ – Jilly Johnson’s, Nina Carter’s – and the later cohort’s – Jordan’s, Keeley Hazell’s, Emma Morgan’s, Hannah Claydon’s – and sometimes the women attached to them spoke. We move through the decades of topless modelling in the Sun (first), the Daily Star (first boob wagon-jumper), the Daily Sport and the ever-swelling mass of competitors (to which lads’ mags were added in the 90s). Hannah Claydon in Page Three: The Naked Truth.īut you can, easily, and Channel 4 duly has. (In much the same way, documentaries about porn don’t need to have blurry images of heads bobbing over laps or shafts disappearing into not-quite-identifiable orifices to light viewers’ way.) I mean, then you’ve got to fill the whole screen with tits, haven’t you? Haven’t you? You haven’t, actually, because most people either know what “a girl” means and if they don’t, a brief(s) description will suffice. It becomes a trickier one to negotiate, of course, when your brief is to mark the 50th anniversary of the introduction into national life of girls, as it was for Channel 4’s accurately titled documentary Page Three: The Naked Truth. How well, you must ask yourself, has this thing succeeded in not simply filling the screen with breasts? From there you can move on to more rarefied considerations such as the acting, the script, the direction. Let’s fill the whole screen with tits.” One of the most fundamental measures of the quality of a film or television programme is how far it manages to move from this elemental truth of entertainment. A s Clark Gable once said when a scene wasn’t working: “I’ve got an idea.