Absorbed by the geeks

The Gadget Show
Five

Kindly forgive the shameless plug, but I've just finished making a documentary for BBC4 (to be shown on 25 June) about the Experimental Music movement that gave us such revered composers as Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, and Michael Nyman.

Coincidentally, I also recently read a newspaper article about dire British sex comedies of the 1970s, and saw a reference to Keep It Up Downstairs, "a sex romp starring Diana Dors, Aimi MacDonald, and Françoise Pascal, with lesbian scenes featuring Mary Millington, Maria Coyne and Olivia Munday" and (wait for it) "music composed and arranged by Michael Nyman".

I was so intrigued by this coincidence that I immediately checked the maestro's official list of film scores in The New Grove Dictionary, which faithfully itemises The Piano, The Diary of Anne Frank, and all his Greenaway films but has curiously overlooked his 1976 opus.

Perhaps Mr Nyman has forgotten about it, too, and should be reminded, because how delightful it would be if he could serenade us at a future Prom with a suite compiled from his sole contribution to the soft porn industry.

I'm not crowing at this discovery though, because I too began my career by working in the sex trade, marketing a device called the Hickey-o-matic.

This was a nozzle that attached to any vacuum cleaner, thereby enabling frustrated young men to suck their own necks and impress their friends by displaying vast but plausible love bites, and the sort of horny gizmo-crazed males who used to buy it now have an entire TV programme aimed at them, The Gadget Show on Five.

Unashamedly devoted "to boys who love their toys", it's fronted by a sultry leather-clad Suzi Perry in full Emma Peel mode, but the target audience is doubtless just as aroused by the impressive range of stateofthe-art consumer ephemerals on display.

However, while Ms Perry set even my jaded pulses racing a little faster as she leaped about last night, I was less excited by the gadgetry - but only because I've reached an age when I've finally realised that it will take more than the purchase of an electronic tie rack to add new meaning to my life.

As if to magnify her status as a fantasy babe, the female presenter was surrounded by spindly geeks for whom the question "do you come from the future?" might have been invented (give them a Bacofoil suit each and we're talking Planet Tharg material).

Take Jason Bradbury, a bald nerd who thought he could give his jelly-mould car that F16-fighter-plane feel by installing a "heads-up display" of his control panel on the windscreen, a plucky and highly dangerous attempt to impress girls that will probably result in his next report coming from an A&E ward.

Or Jon Bentley, who wore the haunted expression of one of Esther Rantzen's former catamites, and spoke excellent sense in clipped Raymond Baxter tones about which televisions we should and shouldn't buy.