British Sex Worker of The Year looking for psychologist & clients for Channel 5

(A version of this piece was also published on the Indian news site WSN)

Charlotte Rose & T-shirt on Skype this week

Charlotte Rose recently won a British Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year.

She had just come back from Cuba when I talked to her two days ago via Skype.

“I’ve got a busy morning,” she told me. “I’ve been able to squeeze my dog into the vet’s at 9 o’clock; somebody’s coming to fix my washing machine; and then Channel 5 TV are giving me a call.”

“How was Cuba?” I asked.

“It was fantastic, but I did slice my knee and I sliced the tip of my toe off in the swimming pool.”

“A shark attack in the swimming pool?” I asked.

“There must be something there with massively over-sized teeth,” laughed Charlotte Rose, “because it really did take a chunk out of my toe. I can’t recall what happened but a lot of things apparently happen in that pool.”

“Were you in Cuba on holiday or for professional reasons?” I asked.

Charlotte in Havana with Che Guevara hat and Cuban cigar

“Holiday,” she replied “I went with a colleague that I work with. Havana is fantastic and the people are fantastic. I’ve got about nine new husbands. The old-fashioned Cadillacs – all the cars – are fantastic. And the Che Guevara Museum was amazing. But what was really interesting was the red light district. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of girls there… and lady boys and gay boys.”

“I’m amazed,” I said. “I’ve never been to Cuba, but I wouldn’t have thought the regime would allow a red light district.”

“They tolerate it,” explained Charlotte Rose. “It’s policed. If you get caught, then you’re arrested. You’ve got cameras on every corner, but there are no cameras on the red light road itself. Over there, the women are quite reserved. There’s no sex before marriage. It’s very Catholic. But, because they’re an equal society, a taxi driver will earn 25 pesos a month and a teacher will earn 25 pesos a month. Our £ is worth about 1.50 pesos and those people are getting 25 pesos a month to live on. A prostitute over there will get 25 pesos for the hour. So, in my opinion, 90% of the women over there will do it with a tourist just to top up their wages.”

“Someone like the Daily Mail ,” I suggested, “would say Oh, prostitutes. Terrible people. But you would say…?”

“I love what I do,” said Charlotte Rose. “People have their own definition of what the word stands for. But it’s how somebody does it. It’s how somebody conducts themselves.

“At the end of the day, what I do is I give the opportunity for people to feel passion and pleasure and intimacy in their lives for a certain amount of time. The bonus I get out of it is knowing I have left that person with such a huge smile on their face and I’m the reason behind that smile. But, like any industry, you get the good and the bad.”

“The Daily Mail,” I said, “would go on about girls being kidnapped in Romania, brought here and forced into prostitution… or prostitutes are all drug addicts… No girl would do it of her own volition…”

“They should come and visit me,” suggested Charlotte Rose, “and I will give them Devon’s finest GFE and I will show them my arms. Yes, we do have the bad side of the industry. Young children, drug addicts, yes, unfortunately, yes. But, if you look at the banking industry, there are nice bankers who enjoy their job and we’ve got bankers who are wankers.

Charlotte Rose tries her hand as rock guitarist Cuban style

“The stories that come out in the papers are always A prostitute was killed in Surrey. Twenty young Cuban girls… You don’t see in the paper Oh, there’s Charlotte Rose, Sex Worker of the Year Award. Fantastic the amount of work she’s doing within the sex industry. Why not?

“I’ve got a Bachelor in Science degree. I moved to Exeter to become a teacher. I realised I don’t like kids – 15-year-old kids don’t want to learn – I did my PGCE, the basic teaching qualification. My degree’s in Hospitality. I’m trained to run a 7-star, 500-bedroom hotel.”

“Why did you become an escort?” I asked.

“I’m very highly-sexed. I detest the idea of picking someone up in a bar. I think it’s dirty. I think it’s seedy. So why not join an agency and get paid for it? I absolutely loved it. I was funding my businesses and I was doing something I enjoyed. I stayed with an agency for a year and then got an apartment and went into escorting independently and never looked back.

“I have a certain minimum that I see each day. I’ve built-up fantastic rapports with lots of my clients. I do a lot of sexual training and relationship coaching. I have clients who see me for troubles in their own relationships. They’ve got me on a retainer. If they have an argument at home, they can phone me and I can coach them. I have clients who come and see me for social skills, because they’re too afraid to do basic chit-chat with people.

“Every fantasy and fetish gets thrown at me and, if it’s something that I can accommodate, I will. It all boils down to If I can make somebody happy, then I will.”

“So,” I said, “you recently won this Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year. Why did you get that?”

Charlotte & Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year

“Because I’m awesome!” laughed Charlotte Rose. “I really love my job and it shows. I’m very passionate about people. I work a lot with disabled people. I work with anybody that wants and needs intimacy and passion in their lives. That’s one of the things I push my business towards. I’m not an escort for a quick fuck for fifteen minutes. My minimum term is an hour. We have a cup of tea together, sit down and talk, get to know each other, relax, then shower and enjoy each other’s company. If I can give somebody the opportunity to feel intimacy, pleasure and passion in their lives, then that’s me happy. I say I work with the three Ps – I work with passion, professionalism and people.”

“Have you reaped any benefits from your Erotic Award?”

“Well, all the regular people I work with think it’s fantastic and I should be working with Channel 5 in the up-and-coming months with regards to the sexual training I offer. So everything’s getting there. Exciting stuff. I was supposed to have worked with Channel 4 on the Sex On Wheels programme, but I pulled out at the last minute because I do have a family and the things that I do… It just wasn’t ready at that point in my life able to go nationally public. But the way things are going now…

“I’m hopefully working with the National Ugly Mugs scheme in regards to my time wasters website.

“The National Ugly Mugs scheme sends out information about dangerous clients to people, but it doesn’t record people who waste your time and having that information is just as valuable. If a client genuinely messes me about, I can upload his phone number onto the website. If he then tries to book with someone else, she can look up his number on the website and it won’t show his number but it will say whether he’s been entered as a time waster. It also has a star system on it to tell you how many times the man has been entered.

“I’ve also got my English Courtesan website and I’ve got a new Sexual Training website which will be online soon and that’s what I’ll be pushing in the Channel 5 programme.”

“What’s the idea behind the Sexual Training website?” I asked.

“To give sexual training,” laughed Charlotte Rose.

“In what way?” I persisted.

“It’s more to do with sexual surrogacy,” she explained. “I’ve been working with ICASA (the Centre for Intuition, Consciousness And Self Awareness) in regards to erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation. There was a client of mine who suffered with premature ejaculation. Just a simple stroke of the arm could make him explode. But, using different therapy techniques, we’ve gone from 3 seconds to 17 minutes.

“I’m not trained in psychology but I am, at the moment, looking for a psychologist I could possibly work with in the future.”

“The Channel 5 show should get you a bit of publicity,” I said.

“We are looking for people to be on the show,” said Charlotte Rose, “but I don’t want it to damage the discretion I have. We are looking for a man in his 40s who has never had sex; a couple; and a disabled client.”

“I don’t think I count for any of those,” I said.

“You could mention in your blog that there’s going to be a TV show on sexual surrogacy and Channel 5 is looking for those three types of people…

“I just think it’s absolutely fantastic that I’ve got an award for what I do. You get all these achievements for the Best Teacher of the Year, the Best Accountant of the Year and people in my profession go un-noticed. It’s only the bad that gets noticed. The message I want to get out is that I’m proud of what I do.”

“And you’ve a busy life,” I said.

“Yes,” said Charlotte Rose, “I’m going to have to put a note on my door to the guy who’s fixing my washing machine to say I’m on an emergency run to the vet.”

The night comedian Malcolm Hardee took his spectacles off during a sex show

Malcolm Hardee and comic spectacle were never far apart

Malcolm Hardee has oft been said to be the father of British alternative comedy, but he was little known by the public except as one of the nude members of the Greatest Show on Legs, who  performed their naked balloon dance on television’s O.T.T. in 1982.

Even quite a time after that TV appearance, Malcolm (who, in effect, managed the comedy troupe) used to get phoned up by promoters and foreign TV companies to perform the dance. Martin Soan, originator of the Greatest Show on Legs, told me last night that they “used to get a fair amount of money to go off and perform it on these very bad Euro television shows. When they phoned up Malcolm to negotiate a fee, he would ask them: How much per bollock?

“In each town we went to,” Martin told me, “Malcolm would seek out the red light district.”

In his autobiography, I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake, Malcolm wrote:

__________

The most bizarre live sex show I ever saw was in Hamburg. The Greatest Show on Legs were performing at the same place The Beatles used to play: it had been converted into a TV studio.

One night, we decided to go on a sex tour and we saw the sign:

PEEP SHOW – 2 MARKS

It was semi-circular outside and there was a series of doors. So Steve Bowditch, myself and Martin Soan all put our 2DM in the slots and went in. Inside, we found ourselves standing next to each other. It had looked like you went in and there would be little individual cubicles. That’s the whole point of a Peep Show. But not this place. We were just standing there in the open together, watching this woman on a bed that moved round in a circle and she could see us standing there right next to the bed.

She somehow took a shine to Steve but he always says the wrong thing. As she was lying there with her legs open on the rotating bed, she struck up a conversation with him. She said:

“You nice English boy”.

She said she’d see him afterwards if he went to the man at the door and gave him money. She was Brazilian. She said she was from America and Steve said:

“Grand Canyon.”

She didn’t laugh.

__________

Martin Soan remembers the incident differently:

__________

It was in Barcelona, probably in the late-1980s.

Malcolm didn’t like anything too seedy, but the El Raval, along Las Ramblas used to be fantastic for the sex industry and had a theatrical bent, a bit of class. One corner had a funfair of sex and we went into this peep show.

In the centre was this girl on a velveteen bed doing all the sexy stuff.

As soon as we went in, the one other man who was in there left immediately and, after he’d left, the girl asked us three: “Are you from London?”

“Yeah,” we said.

“Oh, what part of London?”

And, in the end, she was just sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to us about Greenwich, Deptford and all the rest, when one door opens, a bloke comes in and she says, “Sorry, fellahs, I’ve gotta get back to work again,” and spread her legs and carried on doing what she’d been doing before.

Anyway, Malcolm found this other club called Le Kasbah near Las Ramblas. It cost a bit of money because it was a bit more up-market with raked seating for about 60 people. Malcolm was very excited and told me: “It’s only a couple of years ago they got rid of the stables out the back! They used to have donkeys in the show! Donkeys in the show!”

The audience was strange. There were couples. It was respectable in some bizarre way. There was a stage and, on it, a circular bed and four televsion sets above the stage which the audience could see. You were sitting there and the live action was 3 metres away. So why on earth would you want to look at a small television up in the corner? I think it was just for ‘dressing’ – to make the place look posh.

The show was quite good. They had acts. There was a midget involved and they put a theatrical bent on it. There was a vampire act. He opened up his cloak, but he didn’t have an erection, which was a bit of a surprise. There was an interval. We went up to the bar.

Malcolm mumbled: “ Oy Oy, Oy Oy, good show, good show.”

We sit down again for the second half and these two Brazilian dancers come on. They are fantastic. Absolutely gorgeous. Dancing away. Fantastic! Really, really sexy. Really, really gorgeous.

One of them holds her hand out to me and I go very politely, in a very English way, “Oh, no thanks, no thanks.” So she goes to Steve Bowditch. He says, “No no no thanks.” Then she goes to Malcolm, who says, “Oh… alright then.”

He jumps up. They put him on this bed and it starts revolving. One of them takes his trousers down and starts putting a condom on his very limp penis and the other one, for some reason, takes off his glasses and puts them down by the bed, then starts gyrating over the top of him. The other one is trying unsuccessfully to give him some sort of oral sex which, of course, she’s never going to accomplish on stage.

But he fumbles around, picks up his glasses – the bed was revolving, remember – and all he is interested in is trying to see where the television screens are. He was more interested in seeing himself on TV with two erotic dancers than he was in actually having sex with two erotic dancers. She keeps taking his glasses off and he keeps fumbling around for them – his arm reaching off the bed – the bed is revolving – trying to see the TV screens above him.

I start laughing and laughing and laughing and eventually I see my knees above me because I am laughing so much – I am on the floor. I am roaring with laughter and this very polite bouncer comes up to me and says: “Excuse me, sir, you are going to have to retire out to the foyer because you’re disturbing the show.”

I get to the foyer, still laughing, and there’s this other bloke in there in exactly the same state as me, pissing himself laughing. It turned out he was the barman. He had been working there for five years and never seen anything like it.

Afterwards, outside in the street – I always regret saying this as soon as I’ve said it but – I got down on my knees in front of Malcolm… and said: “Malcolm, you are the fucking funniest man in the fucking universe!”