Tim Fountain — playwright, teacher, chronic over-sharer — has always been “determined to rub people’s faces in the detail of my sex life.” That’s a lot of rubbing if you’ve slept with 5,000 people, and when his one-man show, Sex Addict, is panned as freakish, an introspective Fountain wonders if his jokey title actually reflects a real problem. He, therefore, embarks on a cross-country exploration of what constitutes ‘normal’ British sexuality.
That’s the ‘why’. As for the ‘what’, it looks as if behind every mild-mannered British publican or housewife or banker lurks a dominatrix in Hereford, a swinger in Blackpool, a dogging enthusiast in Glasgow, a sado-masochist in Manchester, a urine devotee in London, a cross-dresser in Hertfordshire, or a bestiality enthusiast in Hull.
Fountain follows his nose, and every intriguing lead in the UK, to conclude that normal is as normal does, and what the Internet has done for British sex is what the airplane has done for world travel. Want to float in urine? Want to dress up as a fox and lie on a pile of other people dressed as animals and paw them affectionately? There’s a website and/or a club for anything and everything. On a perfectly humdrum night in the Abcat cinema, Fountain watches “straight men in a gay porn cinema watching straight porn whilst having sex with a man dressed as a woman, as an effeminate man cuddles up to a big butch straight guy three yards away.”
Although he finds many of his discoveries joyless and depressing, Fountain (as ambassador for British sex) maps sexual subcultures and their vocabularies with flair, and although he isn’t a fabulous writer, he’s an acute and often funny observer — presumably more so if you get the heavily British pop culture references. Love it or hate it, you won’t find it uninteresting. But don’t come within ten yards of it, if you’re a prude.