A new TV documentary has brought two top TV historians to blows. Professor Simon Smutt, famed for his TV series such as the Back Passages of History and Great Queens of England, and Dr David Starkers – star of the Naked Historian – became embroiled in an undignified spat at the press launch of Smutt’s latest programme, Her Majesty Pleasured, with Starkers denouncing it as an historically inaccurate fabrication. The documentary – to be screened later this month on UK Filth, the home of free-to-air digital smut – which claims to reveal the long-suppressed truth about Britain’s Victorian sexual revolution, features a recently rediscovered kinematograph – originally installed in a ‘What-The-Butler-Saw’ machine – which seems to show Her Majesty Queen Victoria stripping naked and participating in lewd acts with other naked performers, of both sexes. Apparently shot on location at Buckingham Palace, one sequence has the Queen, wearing only a crown, seated on her throne with a bare-arsed Charles Dickens across her knee, who she proceeds to spank with her sceptre. “Our documentary will mark the first time this historic piece of erotica has been publicly screened in more than a century and a half,” declared an excited Smutt. “Along with her newly discovered secret sex diaries, this is incontrovertible proof of Britain’s forgotten sexual revolution!” According to the documentary, the trigger for this alleged explosion of eroticism was the appearance of English translations of the Kama Sutra and other works of classical erotica, quickly followed by the publication of first-hand accounts of the exotic sexual practices of various primitive peoples by explorers including Sir Richard Burton and Major Francis Cunnikin. The documentary claims that Queen Victoria was particularly influenced by Cunnikin, whose book The Source of the Orgasm chronicled his search for the ultimate sexual ecstasy amongst the strange and primitive rituals of the tribesmen of Africa and South America. “She was fascinated by his tales of exotic sexual practices in Darkest Africa and the Orient,” reveals Smutt. “She had no idea that such pleasures could be derived from the physical act of sex – Prince Albert had, of course, believed that sex was required only for procreation and performed his marital duties with ruthless German efficiency, but little passion.” The secret diaries reveal that she became besotted with Cunnikin (who was credited with introducing no less than fifty three hitherto unknown sexual positions to the UK, including doggy-style), and succumbed to his advances in the grounds of Balmoral Castle in early 1863. “With a cry of ‘Madam, touch my vitals, before I die!’, he revealed his tumescent manhood!” She chronicled. “I replied, ‘Turn your passions upon me! I lie in wait, my avenue too fair, too open to be miss’d!.’ My very being dissolved into waves of pleasure and liquid pearls as he thrust into me.”
Almost overnight Queen Victoria, and consequently British society, was transformed, with even the Prime Minister presiding over naked cabinet meetings. “Cunnikin’s book became an instant bestseller, with people all over Britain trying to replicate the vigourous primitive sexual rituals it described,” says Smutt. “Several people expired from allergic reactions to bee stings when they followed his accounts of the love-making exploits of a certain Sumatran tribe, and covered themselves in honey before coupling and rolling around in their front gardens. The bee stings apparently had an exhilarating aphrodisiac effect, or so Cunnikin claimed.” Against this background of gentlemen strapping rhino horns to their knobs, in imitation of certain African tribesmen, and ladies painting their bare breasts with pagan fertility symbols before masturbating with dildoes fashioned from elephant tusks, Britain quickly developed the world’s foremost sex industry. “Not only did this country have the brilliant innovative minds to devise such revolutionary devices as the clockwork vibrator, but its great industries provided the means to mass produce them,” explains Smutt. “Up until this time dildos had been hand carved by craftsmen and were affordable only by the very rich, the poor had to make do with broom handles and cucumbers. However, British industry was soon able to mass produce inexpensive, yet highly stimulating, dildos – revolutionising the sexual experiences of the masses.” Other innovations from this period included George Stephenson’s steam powered spanking machine, Sir Richard Arkwright’s portable hand-cranked wanking device and Jethro Tull’s incredible Seed Plot Driller. However, the Victorian erotic revolution came to an abrupt halt when Cunnikin was exposed as a fraud. “It turned out that he hadn’t been anywhere more exotic than Salford,” says Smutt. “His book was pure fantasy, fuelled by his previous career as a peeping Tom in London’s East End. He wasn’t even an officer – he’d never risen above the rank of corporal before his dishonourable discharge from the army following a distasteful incident involving the band of the Coldstream Guards.” Her Majesty, in a state of shock after the realisation that she had handled the privates of a commoner, retreated from public view, whilst the establishment quickly moved to expunge the whole affair from the record. By 1870 the status quo had been virtually restored. “The damage was irreparable; Britain lost its lead in the sex industry to the Netherlands and France, never to regain it,” laments Smutt. “It would be nearly a hundred years before Britain regained the astounding heights of eroticism achieved in the 1860s.”
However, Smutt’s supposed ‘historical evidence’ for the existence of the ‘Swinging 1860s’ ‘was denounced by Starkers as ‘pure fantasy’, when he crashed the press screening, loudly threatening to give his rival a ‘bloody good hiding’ unless the documentary was withdrawn. “Professor Smutt knows full well that both the kinematograph and the diaries are elaborate fakes, produced in Prussia as part of a failed plot by Bismark to destabilise the British Monarchy by convincing straight-laced Britons that they were sexual degenerates unfit to rule, “ he asserted. “Indeed, he and the Kaiser subsequently tried flooding the country with forged bank notes featuring a topless Queen Victoria posing ‘Britannia’-like with a Union Jack emblazoned shield and a large trident on one side and Clive of India buggering several Indian mutineers senseless on the other! That didn’t work either – the notes quickly became much sought after by collectors of bizarre erotica, changing hands for many times their face value!” Chaotic scenes ensued, with Smutt leaping from his podium and wrestling his rival to the ground. Shocked journalists and television executives looked on as the two academics grappled on the ground, trading blows and tearing each other’s clothes off. Finally, following a swift knee to the groin, Smutt appeared to gain the upper hand, hauling the supine Starkers across his knees and pulling down the doctor’s trousers, before administering a good hard spanking. “I think the veracity of my research has been established beyond any reasonable doubt,” declared Smutt, as the humiliated Starkers was dragged from the screening by security guards, pointing out that trial by combat had been established as a legitimate form of academic peer review following Oppenheimer’s knockout victory over Fermi in 1943. “Dr Starkers’ notorious Prussian sex scandal obsessions are well known – and have been widely discredited. Only last year I was instrumental in debunking his televised claims that during World War One the Germans had painted their giant Zeppelins pink with purple ends when they raided London, in the hope that British morale would crumble at the apparent size of Germany’s manhood! I just hope this incident has finally laid the matter to rest!”
