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Wasn't porn illegal in the UK until semi-recently, hence the "catching up" aspect?

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Yes, however the real problem is the marketplace itself. All porn is classified as 'R18' by the British Board of Film Classification (formerly 'Censors'), which means it can only be sold in a licenced sex shop, in person. Mail Order of R18 is strictly illegal, but there are many offshore companies that do it. If a licenced UK retailer started offering mail order within the UK, they'd be looking at jail time. As you can imagine, the same applies for producers...no sales via mail order.

Therefore, if you are a producer or distributor (as I once was), you have only one legal outlet for your product. 80-90% of the stores at the time I was doing business were owned by a single chain, and if they didn't take your product, you'd be left with the smaller chains (which Harmony was at the time) and the independents. As you can imagine, when you've got to pay for rights, certification, duplication, sleeves, etc then it gets difficult to make a profit if you're selling to 10% or less of the market.

As an independent distributor, you have no leeway on price. It's not like you can turn around and say 'If the stores don't want to pay x for it, we'll just sell it via mail order.' You have but one marketplace, and if you won't sell to them at the price they want to pay, then you're going to left with a bunch of product that you cannot legally offload anywhere else. I can't plame the stores for wanting to pay rock bottom prices either...at the time I was working in one, licences in London were pushing $60,000...and that's just to be licenced. Then you have rent (not cheap in our nation's capital!), electricity, stock, wages, taxes, etc.

I first heard the whisper that hardcore was going to be legalised when I was working in a sex shop, and at the time they were talking about mail order too, but that never panned out. Once I realised that the market wasn't going to change, I sold on my rights and got the fuck out while I was still ahead, because I could see that being an independent distributor would not be sustainable, especially when most of the store chains also licence and distribute films of their own from big producers like Private, Evil Angel, Hustler etc. Why should they buy my product when they can sell their own and sell it on to other competing store chains as well?

(I should point out my product was not crap either...I put out the first hardcore vid featuring Zsanette 'Sandy' Egerhazi who was Club Magazine's regular model at the time, and I also had some stuff with Tera Patrick in it at the peak of her popularity...and I seem to recall speaking to some guy named Jeff Steward when I was going about getting the rights for it, because when I came to XPT and saw the ad for Jerk Off Zone, I suddenly remember where I had first heard of it! )

For a few years afterwards, I would look at big UK distributors like Hot Rod and wonder how they did it, and chastise myself for not perhaps sticking it out a little longer, but when they went out of business last year with massive debts, I knew my decision had been thoroughly vindicated. I could see the web was the place to be.

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Also, the pallid, snaggle-toothed nature of the vast majority of the citizenry results in a minuscule talent pool?

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