Porn to be wild

With or without your partner, most of you will have seen a porn movie. Very few, however, will ever get the opportunity of watching one get made. So when Playboy TV offered us the chance to make our own short soft-core film, we couldn't resist and sent Jamie Walters to direct his first, and definitely last, entry in the field.

You don't have to be a regular consumer of porn films to know that the genre is to cinema what McDonalds is to haute cuisine. Given some McMeat, a sesame seed bun and a lettuce, I'm pretty sure I could make a Big Mac. With a studio, some models and a cameraman already laid on, a porn film should be a doddle.

How difficult could it be? Just invent a banal storyline involving nakedness and then direct some actors (actually, industry parlance downgrades them to models) to play out the scene. Bang. It's a wrap. Easy.

I wasn't alone in my confidence. Five journalists - three women and two men - from a variety of publications (including a daily broadsheet) also fancied their chances. So we were grouped according to our gender and told to make a movie.

Lights, camera, action

The lads went first and we came up with a classic plotline. Girl one, in real-life a 23-year-old blonde Hungarian called Kat, is a photographer shooting girl two. She's called Catherine and is playing the part of a model hired for a glossy mag. Their assistant - old pro of the British porn industry called Steve Hooper - is sent off to get some more film. While he's away, Kat and Catherine start getting fruity. Steve walks in on it, feigns shock and is then forced to join in. Simple. No twists, no subtext, no subtlety.

Sadly, it was no good either. In fact, Richard Ings, director of programming at Playboy TV, said it was rubbish. Why? Because my co-director and I were too polite and didn't ask the models to get down and dirty in time. 'You needed to overcome your reticence about asking them to take their clothes off,' he said. 'Models charge by the day and you generally only have 90 minutes to do a 15-minute scene.'

What Ings failed to understand is that for a boring middle-class boy, ordering women to have sex is far from natural. In fact, it feels downright wrong: a feeling amplified by spending half-an-hour talking to Catherine. She's 19 years old, left home at 14, has a brother in prison, is getting divorced after having been married a mere four months, and was on her very first porn assignment.

I know I'm a journalist, but I do have some scruples. But as far as the porn industry is concerned, that's a severe handicap. The female group that followed us grasped this from the start. They wasted no time in getting the performers naked and were anything but shy.

How can you be when you're asking a naked man to spread melting white on a girl's midriff? And it didn't stop there. The white was followed by the brown, with Nutella being smeared on the genitals - a big mistake. If I learned anything from this day, it's that chocolate spread looks like something completely different on-screen, and it doesn't take a Herculean leap of the imagination to work out what that is...

I learned something else, too: that seeing penetrative sex four feet away from you is unpleasant. After hours of behaving tamely, the Nutella incident models had apparently got bored and decided to go hard-core. It was my cue to leave.

So that's how my brief flirtation with porn ended. And I haven't felt right since. Next week, I'll be going to McDonalds to find out if seeing a Big Mac being put in its bun makes me feel just as dirty.

Double Entry - Making It Big, the new reality TV show from Playboy TV, starts on Monday May 26, going out free to air on Sky Channel 968 at 10pm, then every week on Thursday at 9pm. For more information, visit www.playboytv.co.uk