I made a porn film for my 30th

My best girlfriend and I both turned 30 this year. Her birthday was a couple of months ago. Mine was yesterday. She celebrated by bringing her newborn baby back from the hospital with her lovely husband. I celebrated by making a pornographic movie and sitting in my smoky basement flat writing a book about it.

You might think that my best girlfriend and I have gone in two different directions. But not at all. Both the book and the baby were labours of love; both were adventures that we were ready to embrace at this point in our lives; and both involve a lot of waking up in the middle of the night and crying.

Actually, I've stopped doing that. I did most of my waking up and crying during the gap between signing the book deal (in order to raise money to make the film) and actually going off to make it. What on earth had I done? And why, why was I doing it? There are a lot of answers to that last question; you don't run away to Amsterdam and make a porn film lightly. Well, I don't. John Stagliano, aka "Buttman", probably does a little less soul-searching.

The short answer is that I took a job, with a platonic male friend, as resident porn critics for The Erotic Review magazine, literary Middle England's answer to Razzle. It was only meant to be a bit of fun - writing earnest critiques about what motivates this gardener or why that naughty doctor isn't struck off - but it soon turned to boredom, frustration and occasionally disgust. These were films made for grubby men with little interest in emotional truth and still less interest in whether the women involved were having a bad time. We decided we could do a better job of it ourselves: write a real story, with an improved dialogue, and treat the actors like people rather than pieces of meat.

Everybody harbours secret dreams they're never going to follow through. Opening a bar, climbing Ben Nevis, taking six months off to drive across Africa. I was going to turn 30 and I'd never really done anything. I hadn't even done the basic thing of getting married and having children. The plus side of being single and free from real responsibility should be that you can run off and have adventures: some women's biological clocks urge them to have babies, mine was urging me to get on a plane and do something crazy.

Of course, pornography wasn't a random choice. It's everywhere these days, colouring our entire culture - and after two years of watching rude movies, I still hadn't worked out if the principle was fundamentally right or wrong.

How better to decide than by infiltrating the industry itself ? I thought the book we wrote might be genuinely enlightening, and certainly funny. An inexperienced English girl and a shy vicar's son in the jaded world of international porn? Needless to say, a thousand things went wrong. Having failed to find the professional "porn agency" we anticipated locating in Amsterdam, we ended up simply casting a bunch of people we befriended in Holland who fancied a change of career. The randy plumber is played by the man who came round to fix my computer.

Our brilliant amateur cast were constantly getting the giggles in the middle of sex scenes. Some days, none of us was in the mood and we all just went for hot chocolate. And our hugely ambitious script was somewhat compromised by the fact that our leading actor was profoundly dyslexic, and everybody else was Dutch.

It really was as cosy as it sounds - which is why it feels odd when people assume our project was an act of rebellion. I didn't want to shock or offend anybody, although I was aware that this might be a side-effect. I certainly wondered what future boyfriends might think. Men I've spoken to since have tended to be delighted rather than shocked, but this is more scary than reassuring. If they assume I'm going to be a real bundle of fun in the sack, leaping into bed on a first date and whipping out the handcuffs, they're going to be terribly disappointed.

My family were quite unhappy when I first raised the idea. Their main concern was the potential danger: that I was wandering blithely into some gun-running mafia-controlled operation and that (as a vicar's son and professional comedy writer) my friend Charlie would be somewhat ineffectual when the heavies barged into our rented flat. I calmed my mother with postcards explaining that the only muscleman in our movie had a day job as a floral greetings card designer.

In the end, my parents' reaction was my greatest worry. By the time I got home from Holland I knew that I had made a funny film, and one for couples rather than grubby lone men. Everybody involved had been treated with proper respect, and I had fulfilled my need to have an adventure before I turned 30. I had filmed an exotic dancer frolicking with a placid German dominatrix. I had stood quietly behind a camera while a suave 35-year-old Dutch gigolo performed the stage direction: "Uncle Siegfried indulges in an act of self-abuse." That was the easy bit.

I could now watch anybody having sex without the slightest embarrassment.

But two weeks ago, when I placed the finished book on my parents' hall table, I knew the true meaning of fear.

Two hours later my father phoned me, giggling. And once my dad laughs, you know you're all right. They even bought me dinner on my birthday: their beloved pornographer daughter. Once More, With Feeling by Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton is published today by Fourth Estate (£10.99).