A Channel 4 documentary about the porn star Bonnie Blue risks glamorising degrading sex, the children’s commissioner has warned as businesses demand that the broadcaster remove their adverts from the programme.
1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue Story, which was broadcast on Tuesday at 10pm, has been criticised for failing adequately to challenge either the men who have sex with the OnlyFans creator or Blue’s view that such behaviour does not harm society.
It featured footage of Blue, 26, having sex with three men simultaneously as well as showcasing the run-up to a schoolgirl-inspired orgy.
After it aired on Channel 4, a number of companies asked that their adverts be removed from the documentary on its online platform and app.
The card payment business Visa, the juice maker Cawston Press and the vodka brand Smirnoff, which is owned by the drinks giant Diageo, had ads which appeared online during 1000 Men and Me, but told Channel 4 that they did not want their products promoted during the programme as it did not chime with their advertising guidelines or their values.
• Janice Turner meets Bonnie Blue
Channel 4 has been criticised for making the documentary freely available on its app and online where it is easily accessible to teenagers on their phones, outside the television watershed.
Although users are allowed to register for the broadcaster’s online services from the age of 16, they are technically blocked from watching the documentary unless they are 18. However, the documentary was still the first and most prominent show promoted to the 16-17 age group when users opened the app for much of last week.
Critics also point out there is still no age verification process to prevent children from lying about their date of birth or using an adult’s account to see it.
The documentary was released days after new rules were introduced requiring social media sites and other internet platforms to implement safety measures protecting children from graphic content.
‘Taking a step back’
The children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, said the documentary risked damaging the fight to protect teenagers from the deleterious effects of online porn.
She said: “For years we have been fighting to protect our children from the kind of degrading, violent sex that exists freely on their social media feeds. This documentary risks taking us a step back by glamorising, even normalising, the things young people tell me are frightening, confusing and damaging to their relationships.”
Dame Rachel de Souza
AARON CHOWN/PA
Blue, from Nottinghamshire, whose real name is Tia Billinger, first become famous on OnlyFans, initially filming sex with “barely legal” young male students and then attracting attention with stunts including one in which she had sex with more than 1,000 men in 24 hours. She was permanently banned from OnlyFans in June for proposing an even more extreme stunt.
The Conservative peer Baroness Bertin, a former adviser to David Cameron when he was prime minister and who recently led the government’s independent review of the regulation of online pornography, said: “Channel 4 showed a surprising lack of judgment in showing such explicit sex scenes. More widely the glamorisation and normalisation of content creators like Bonnie Blue does undoubtedly have an effect. In my opinion, this is a direction of travel that is not particularly helpful for society nor is it prudish to call it out as such.”
The documentary included footage of Blue in a classroom with other younger OnlyFans creators who were dressed in school uniforms as they prepared to film an orgy. While the participants were all stated to be over 18, some of the women appeared younger and one, Madison, said her subscribers liked her because she looked underage.
TV industry sources expect the broadcasting regulator Ofcom to open an investigation into the documentary after receiving a number of complaints from viewers. Ofcom said a decision has not yet been made, but that it was “assessing the complaints against [its] rules”, while Channel 4 said the final programme was “compliant with the Ofcom broadcasting code”.
The regulator is likely to scrutinise whether the explicit material was justified in the context and whether the documentary was adequately edited.
Bonnie Blue’s mother, Sarah, appears in the documentary
Chris Banatvala, a media consultant who was formerly Ofcom’s founding director of standards, said: “The stronger the material — whether it is sex or violence — the more it has to be contextualised and therefore requires very strong justification for a factual programme.
“This is very strong sexual material — some may even argue deviant material — so has Channel 4 in its scripting and its overall editorial approach appropriately contextualised that?
“The second question is pixellation — by blurring some images, Channel 4 has clearly recognised that some things are not acceptable for broadcast, but did it pixellate to the right level?”
Banatvala said Ofcom was likely to pay close attention for potential breaches of its code. He added: “Ofcom would need to assess whether the programme adequately explained and contextualised the use of an adult porn actress [who is interviewed] who clearly looks well underage and is dressed in school uniform. That kind of material in pornography is prohibited in the UK and while Channel 4 is not showing this material for viewers’ sexual gratification, it may be required to put into context that when used in pornography, it is seriously problematic.”
The observational documentary, which was directed by Victoria Silver and edited by Kate Spankie, was made by the independent production company Magnificent Pictures, and commissioned at Channel 4 by Tim Hancock. It was approved by Ian Katz, the chief content officer at Channel 4, and Jonathan Allan, its interim chief executive. The board was told about the documentary in advance.
Katz, 57, defended the documentary, arguing it is “clearly a legitimate subject” as she is “a huge phenomenon” who has “transformed the porn industry”. He claimed that Blue was sufficiently challenged about her actions in the programme.
“She’s got massive influence on the way that millions of young men, sadly, think about sex,” he said. “She [the documentary maker] did challenge [Blue] a few times during the film, but this wasn’t a Today programme interview. This was an observational documentary, and the idea of that approach is to get the audience up as close to the reality of a story, and then let them decide what they think about it. And I think a huge proportion of the audience would be deeply horrified by what they saw and reach their own conclusions … And I think judging an observational documentary by the standards of an accountability interview is pointless — it’s a completely different type of broadcasting.”
Katz added that the documentary had gone through all Channel 4’s usual legal, editorial and compliance checks, and had all the appropriate warnings, as well as “age gating” on its service, which restricts access to particular programmes by age and parental consent. He also claimed that the issue of the young women looking underage was addressed in the film.
Channel 4 is currently in a period of limbo, waiting for the appointment of a new chair and then chief executive. It has a long history of pushing boundaries, especially around sexual content with shows such as Naked Attraction and past documentaries including The Annabel Chong Story, shown in 2002, which told a similar story of a porn actress trying to “break a record” for the number of men she had sex with (she managed 70 men but multiple times, making a total of 251 sexual acts).