The 1986 Sex Maniac’s Ball

In 2012, I inherited a massive tranche of documents from the actor David Webb. As well as being a close friend and legal consultant for Webb’s anti-censorship outfit, Ted Goodman was his executor and asked me to set up an archive, which I did. By the time I’d finished, I had actually set up two archives, the latter containing personal documents, including photographs, theatre programmes and the like.

Over the years I have added quite a bit of material to the Fan Site, including from unrelated sources, but today I have added one I have just got round to scanning, one of his that was long overdue. O, the busy life I lead!

The Sex Maniac’s Ball was the brainchild of Tuppy Owens, who died last month. The 1986 event was held at the London Dungeon, the first of many.

Sometimes, the apostrophe appears after the s, and sometimes it doesn’t appear at all.

The image below is an advertisement of sorts. Most people will have no problem identifying the three people at the top of the page, but for younger readers, the woman with the glasses is Mary Whitehouse.

Mrs Whitehouse, as she was often known, rose to prominence in the 1960s when she began campaigning against the “filth” she perceived to be swamping television. She died in 2001 at the age of 91. If she could see some of the stuff that appears on TV and elsewhere today, she’d yearn for the good old days when the word “bloody” was regarded as a controversial utterance.

I doubt Mrs Whitehouse was ever invited to the Sex Maniac’s Ball, but she was invited to the Conservative Party Conference where I met her once. The high point of that visit was my arrest on suspicion of being a member of the IRA, but exchanging verbal jabs with her was entertaining.

There is now more media than ever before, a media that is open to everyone, something that doesn’t go down at all well with most of the mainstream, which is one of the reasons for the ongoing attempts to censor the Internet, attempts which will hopefully never succeed.