Page Three: The Naked Truth

Channel 4, 9pm

****

FOR all that this documentary focussed on the women who appeared on Page Three, what struck you were the men.

They were everywhere. Taking the photos, in editorial meetings, commenting on models’ bodies, the chat show host who groped Sam Fox live on air. All of them earning a wage, a cheap laugh, from the exploitation of women.

Ah, here we go again, humourless feminist railing about a bit of innocent fun. That was the other constant in Toby Trackman’s bittersweet film – the use of the word “fun”. We had so much fun, says one former Page Three model. It was a fun ride, says another. But not for all of them, we saw.

It has been half a century since the British tabloid reading public first opened a paper to find a topless woman gazing out at them. As weird as that may sound to young women today, it was routine, as common as adverts for cars or shampoo.

The bringer of breasts to the British press was one Rupert Murdoch, esq. Within a year he had doubled the circulation of the Sun and other red tops wanted in on the action. There were bidding wars for certain models.

At this point in the story, the era of posh gels Jilly Johnson ("My parents were a bit speechless") and Nina Carter, the tone was light. Cue the arrival of Kelvin MacKenzie as editor of the Sun. As media commentator Roy Greenslade sniffed: "He was much more vulgar in his approach." After MacKenzie came the Sport. The women got younger, the poses more daring. When one paper published photos of a 15-year-old and promised to show her topless on her 16th birthday it was time for the law to finally intervene.

Samantha Fox, one of the most well known of the models, was just 16 when her mother sent a photo in for a competition to find the next Page Three “star”. A photographer told her she had “the face of a child but the body of a woman”.

If your flesh did not crawl at that, there was worse to come. Tales of photographers promising models that shots would stay private, of pictures being sold on to porn mags, of having to go to school the day after publication, of newspaper stings and scandals.

It was not all sleaze and exploitation. As the majority of those interviewed acknowledged, Page Three had its advantages, not least of which was money. Young women from predominantly working class backgrounds could earn more than they ever thought possible. The smart ones invested it (one bought property in London), or, like Fox, embarked on another successful career, in her case singing.

As Trackman’s film showed, almost as long as there was Page Three there was a campaign, initially led by MP Clare Short, to get rid of it. Pilloried in the press and by many fellow MPs, she was as clear today as then why it had to go. “What Page Three says is take me, use me, throw me away.”

There could have been more on the campaign, much in the way another recent documentary, Miss World 1970: Beauty Queens and Bedlam, picked apart the famous flour-bombing of Bob Hope live on television. What were the early tactics? Why did it take till 2015 for The Sun to quietly retire the feature? Nor was much said about what came after with the internet.

Yet it was right that most of the focus was on the women themselves. Fox was among the best of the bunch: funny (she thought a fan blowing cold air at her was to show her hair off at its best), and with a story about a well-known pop star that would have you rushing out to topple his statue had anyone been daft enough to erect one.

At the outset, the film had set itself the simple question: was Page Three good or bad for the women involved? Answer: for a few it was good, for some of the time. In Fox’s words: “None of us were forced into doing it. We did it because we loved it.”

As for the rest, anyone who came out of this hour thinking Page Three was all good, clean fun had really not been paying attention.