Ad Mat Merriment

 As a lad of nine I was obsessed with this ad mat. Snipped from a '71 edition of 'The Sun', a Melbourne newspaper that became the 'Herald-Sun', I tucked it between a dozen books on its eventual journey to my bumper scrapbook.

It was clear to me that these 'Crazy Danes' were my kind of people, and this healthy blonde lass, Birte Tove, was someone I should meet.

Well, I did attempt to meet Ms. Tove during a visit to my beloved city on a rainy Monday afternoon with my mother. Every three months, I had an appointment with my eye doctor. As I wore ultra-magnified glasses and a dirty, big eye patch to address my amblyopeia, I was on the doc's watch list. That meant regular check-ups, concerned nods, and cavernous waiting rooms.

His office was at the Paris end of Melbourne's Collins St., an upmarket area that ran parallel with Bourke St., which was where the 'Times' cinema was located. My mission that day was to escape from my mother and sneak into Bedside Dentist. Considering the fact that I was exactly nine years shy of being legally allowed to watch this R-rated movie, some challenges lay ahead.

On this occasion, I decided not to mention the movie or my intentions beforehand. It's not that I would have announced an intention to view porn -- on the contrary, my usual MO was to take part of a film's title -- the 'Dentist' part, example -- and convince my mother that watching said film would be an educational experience. In this case, I decided against doing that. Recent efforts to view R-rated material had backfired and I'd been sent packing to my bedroom.

After my eye doctor had peered at me over his funny little glasses and nodded at my mother a dozen times, I would do my customary run down ten flights of stairs to meet her on the street below. I didn't take elevators in those days because running down ten flights of stairs was so much more rewarding. Because the removal of my eye patch was somewhat painful and because I was a slightly pathetic looking fellow back then, my mother was somewhat sympathetic to my post-appointment requests. Catching the drizzling rain on my nose and refusing to share this woman's umbrella, I asked her in a pained voice if I could visit the Magic Shop to see the Coffin Bank. The Coffin Bank was a tin coffin on which you placed a coin. Moments later, a yellow, skeletal hand would shoot from the coffin's innards and steal your coin. I'd seen it all before, but I needed to be in the area because the Times cinema was -- yep, you guessed it! -- next door.

It took us ten minutes on slippery streets to make our way to the Magic Shop. As my mother had little interest in magic or coin-stealing coffins, she'd linger at the door. I don't remember her ever entering the store. It was as if she feared becoming tainted by the pagan trickery inside. I made a point of being very interested in the Coffin Bank and a variety of other gimmicks. I was so convincing in my enthusiasm that my mother became antsy and announced that she'd walk across the street to have a look in Coles, an old department store. "Don't go anywhere," were her parting words. I watched her cross the wet street and go into Coles. Now I was free to meet Birte Tove.

Right away I left the store and turned hard right. I stopped outside the Times and came face-to-face with a glossier version of the poster on the ad mat above. Bloody hell, what a movie this would be! And Birte Tove -- what a beauty. A gentleman in an expensive raincoat slipped past me, the porn/raincoat connection not yet part of my awareness. The thing was, I was wearing a yellow raincoat, and I was surely the youngest raincoater to demonstrate interest in this classic piece of Danish celluloid.

Taking the gentleman's lead, I whipped into the theater's tiny foyer and stopped behind him as he paid for the privilege of meeting Birte Tove and her horny girlfriends. Oh, shit! There was one problem. How was I going to pay? I had no money. My mother did my paying. When money came out of her purse, it went towards things like lunch and train tickets and milk and bread and vegetables. Some of it went into the collection plate at church, too. At that terrible moment I knew for sure that none of my mother's money would ever be going into Birte Tove's hand. I didn't articulate it quite so brutally back then, but in a word, this nine-year-old raincoater was fucked!

Suddenly, I was alone in front of the ticket box. Being small, I could only see frizzy hair on the head of the lady inside it, and she said: "What can we do for you, son?"

"One ticket, please."

I was shaking in my yellow raincoat as I waited for a miracle. In a moment, a free ticket to meet Ms. Tove would be slipped under the window towards me. I would accept it politely and with all the dignity a raincoater could muster, I'd say "Thank you", and stroll into the theater like a regular gentleman.

"You've GOT to be joking. GET OUT!"

Huh?

This wasn't the miracle I was expecting.

"GO ON! GET OUT! Where's your mother?"

I emerged from the Times a deflated little man of nine. I looked at the poster and shed a tear or two. My eyes misted up like car windows. Why couldn't I be eighteen now? Why couldn't I meet Birte Tove? I bet that well-dressed gentleman didn't like Birte Tove as much I I did. It wasn't fair.

I found myself back at the Magic Shop looking at disguises. Didn't they have anything to make me look taller? I don't think the Groucho glasses would have helped me. The Frankenstein mask would have drawn the wrong kind of attention.

My mother never knew about her son's failed raincoater adventure. She picked me up, took me back across the road to the Coles Cafeteria for lunch, and we rode the train home with noisy schoolgirls. None of them held a candle to Birte Tove. None of them sported that special smile.

Nine years later, after I became a legal raincoater, I became aware of another Tove named Tiny. Was Tiny the daughter of Birte? Tiny Tove found employment at Peter Theander's Color Climax Corporation and was marketed as a young looking lass who loved a johnson or three.

Bless the Toves.

What I remember most about this movie was a neighbor mentioning to my dad that he'd seen it. When I asked, "What was it about?", he looked at my dad as if to say: "Who the fuck's the pint-sized pervert!?"

I finally saw the movie in the mid-80's and really liked it. It's more of a biting comedy about relationships than anything particularly erotic.

Is it just me, or does the woman in the top photo really look like she a breast hanging from her neck?

In every Carry On movie, dear old Kenneth Williams has this shocked and appalled look on his face. I love it.

I'm not sure why, but he was always my favorite character. I loved his reactions to everything. A gay man reacting so conservatively to anything salacious!?

I saw this at the Clayton drive-in paired with Steve McQueen's The Reivers. My dad laughed a lot at Sid James and Co., but had nothing nice to say about Steve's film. All I could think about afterwards was how much fun it would be to sneak my dad's car out of the garage and go on an adventure with it. Of course, knowing how to drive it didn't seem relevant at the time. As far as I was concerned, you only had to steer, anyway. I had a bike! I knew steering.

Not Suitable For Children

"What the Swedes are doing sexually today is so far advanced it makes the rest of the world look positively inadequate," the ad mat declared.

Wow! What the heck were these Swedes doing? And what's a Swede? I asked myself back in 1970. I wanted to know. I wanted to find out as much as I could about these "Swedish sexual practices". Perhaps I could learn how to make the world feel inadequate, too.

There was just one problem (no, make that two): I was only 8 years old, and I didn't know what "inadequate" meant yet.

But that didn't stop me from being curious. These ad mats were my first exposure to the birds and the bees. They were my pornography, my secret stash, and they were delivered every Thursday in my father's newspaper. I had only to cut them out after my mother had read the Death Notices and checked the Weather.

The Times was Greater Union's venue of choice for softcore porn from Europe; probably derived its name from Times Square. Made sense. It was a tiny little theatre that wasn't associated with Melbourne's official porno theatres, The Star and The Barrel. It had a legitimacy that allowed punters to duck in and duck out and not worry about being seen by a neighbor or co-workers. It filled a need and did so discreetly.

It's interesting to note that the listings for Melbourne's city cinemas would often feature a "Hurry Last Weeks" line, a gentle reminder to punters that their opportunity to see said movie was running out.

The Times did not operate on Sunday, an indicator that its customers were office workers.

'Nudist Paradise' had me in a spin. It was filmed in "Nudiscope" for heaven's sakes, and "nature color".

"Nudiscope?" Was that better than "Cinemascope" and "Technoscope?" Had to be. When my eyes fell upon this enticing ad mat and started to bug out, I convinced myself that in order to film people nude, you needed a Nudiscope camera to do it. That was why 'Nudist Paradise' was filmed with such cameras, right? It made complete sense.

The baffling aspect of the ad mat, however, was that the film was rated "M" (for Mature audiences). It baffled me because I was allowed to watch M-rated films if my parents accompanied me; but if 'Nudist Paradise' was really as full of nudity as my 10 year old mind imagined, how could I be allowed to see it? Had they made a mistake with the rating? Whatever they'd done, I had to see the film before someone got wise to their mistake.

I approached my mother and asked her if I could see a new film that was playing in the city.

"What film?" she asked me.

"Just a film," I replied.

"What is it?"

"It's an M-rated film," I said.

"Well, I don't know about that," she continued. "Who's going to take you?"

"You can. Or dad can."

"We'll see."

Later that night, after I dried the dishes with my mother, she brought me the newspaper and asked me to point to the film I wanted to see.

Where the ad mat had once been there was now a neat, square hole.

I was somewhat busted.

"Oh, I think it ripped off and it's in my room," I explained.

"Go and get it."

I disappeared and returned with my massive ad mat scrapbook. I placed it in front of my mother and, using two hands to open the thick, cardboard cover, flipped forward to where I'd pasted in 'Nudist Paradise'. Sheepishly, I pointed to it.

"What's that?" she asked, as if she was seeing double.

"That's the film," I said.

"THAT'S the film?" She shook her head in disgust. "I don't think you'll be seeing that rot." She emphasized "rot" and gave me a look of deep disappointment that haunted me for months. "Why would anybody go to see that?"

I had no answers.

"And what kind of theatre is that?" she said, pointing to the 'Star Adult Cinema' logo.

"Kids go there, too," I insisted

She grunted and glared at me. "Not my kids."

I paused and closed the book. "It's only rated M."

"It's not suitable for little boys. Or anybody."

I paused the pause of a semi-defeated man. I nodded, as if to agree with my mum's assessment of the film's unsuitability. I hoped that that would soften her up for what I blurted out next: "Mum, maybe dad's going to see it. I could see it with him."

My blurt got me a look that killed and this: "Your dad's not interested in things like that. Now go to bed."

Maybe I was wrong about the magazines I'd found in the garage while I was nailing carpet to the seat of my Billy Cart. Maybe they belonged to somebody else.

Anyway, that was that.

My attempt to see 'Nudist Paradise' failed, as had my attempt to see 'Born Losers'.

I had two strikes against me, but I wasn't out yet.

As for 'Nudiscope'? It was a process that found no supporters in our house.

Today, almost four decades later, The Star, the first and greatest of Melbourne's porno cinemas, still remains in operation. Renamed The Crazy Horse, it continues to serve loyal punters at 34 Elizabeth St., Melbourne. Just don't roll up expecting horse porn from Brazil.

The cinema can be found at: h***://www.crazyhorsecinema.com/ (replace ***'s with "ttp")

The "Sex in the Office" ad mat , a '71 film, was pasted forever into my beloved scrapbook before my father even got a chance to open the newspaper that morning. It was Gold! I took out an entire section of the paper so there would be no perfect square holes for my father to query. I stuffed it into my schoolbag and threw it from the bus window on the way to school.

As you can see, it's quite a find. My first question was: Has she been using that drill on her breasts? This was followed by: Wouldn't that hurt? It annoyed me that "Don't miss it" was plastered across the bloody damage, but I was grateful also because my young mind was not yet ready for sex of this nature. And certainly not sex and violence.

My father owned a printing company that had offices. Did this kind of thing go on in his offices? My brother and I had worked for him on our school holidays, but we'd never witnessed anybody drilling their breasts. They didn't even have drills at my father's factory. They had girls, though, and most of them had breasts.

Back in the good old days, Village's East End cinema complex, which had three screens, projected a diverse catalog of European softcore pornography. All the big chains screened lots of Euro softcore in the 70's. It was terribly cut, of course, by the prudish Australian censor, but it was plentiful.

To a young lad like myself, the ad mats were the movie, and when I caught up with many of these titles years later, most disappointed.

When I finally learned that 'Nudist Paradise' was a drab documentary that had been produced in 1959, and was as tame as a one-legged dog on Prozac , I was crushed. I stopped believing in "Nudiscope" a couple of years after I stopped believing in Santa.