23-07-2025
Interview with porn actress Bonnie Blue goes with a bang
I recently interviewed Bonnie Blue, aka Tia Billinger of Derbyshire, the OnlyFans 'content creator' who claims to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. (My piece will be in Saturday's Times Magazine.) It was a bleakly fascinating couple of hours in the murkiest end of porn culture, with one lighter moment.
The room we'd been allocated was a glass box in the midst of the Sunday Times newsroom and at about 5.30pm a leaving ceremony must have taken place. I knew this because suddenly all the journalists in the outer office began rhythmically thumping their desks.
This is an ancient — and sometimes rather moving — tradition going back to Fleet Street's hot metal days when a departing colleague, or an apprentice who'd finished his training, was led out of the building while everyone bashed their metal rulers on tables to make a celebratory din. And this is how I found myself explaining to a rather puzzled Bonnie Blue that we call this 'banging out'.
It is now three months since the Supreme Court ruling brought clarity to the meaning of sex under the Equality Act. Many organisations, especially sporting bodies, seem relieved they are now legally compelled to do what they'd wanted all along, ie override a tiny activist minority to protect female spaces, categories and employees.
But for some gender soldiers the war will never be over. On the BBC website is a court report about a 'woman' called Joanna Rowland-Stuart, a 'wife' who is charged with picking up her own samurai sword then stabbing and slicing her husband Andrew to death. Only many paragraphs down are we told this person is transgender and there are no women in this story. A man has been charged with killing another man. It is male-on-male violence. Yet in the BBC's fantasy world a woman buys a samurai sword and chops up her husband.
There have also been some astonishing pronouncements in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, concerning a nurse of 30 years' service with an unimpeachable record, suspended by NHS Fife for asking to undress without being watched by a male doctor, Dr Beth Upton.
Isla Bumba (salary £50K), NHS Fife's 'equality lead', was asked under oath if she was female. 'No one knows' their own sex, she said, unless they've had their chromosomes tested. When Dr Kate Searle was asked the same question, she replied 'It's on my birth certificate … It's a decision made at birth by the people delivering the baby. I'm not an expert in it.' She is in fact a senior A&E consultant. I wonder what she thinks is observed in utero during a 20-week pregnancy scan.
I bump into an acquaintance I've not seen in person for five years but whose photos I often view on Instagram. I've always regarded her as the most beautiful woman I know, yet I can barely follow our conversation for thinking: what did she do to her lovely face?
Her cheeks bulge with fillers, her mouth is strangely swollen. I imagine her staring into the mirror despairing at the hollowings and thinnings of age and thinking 'just a little bit here, a tad more there'. 'Aesthetics' doctors are happy to take your money and will rarely say 'stop'. Her face doesn't really look younger, just… odd. The saddest thing is that with her bone structure and skin she'd have been beautiful at any age.
A very droll, self-deprecating interview with Bill Nighy on Radio 4's This Cultural Life made me realise I hadn't watched him in much else except Love Actually. So I checked out his other work and found on Apple TV David Hare's 2011-14 plays The Worricker Trilogy with Nighy as a cynical, elegantly tailored renegade spy. You think nothing much has changed in a decade, that we are the same society just with more sophisticated phones. But the trilogy's subject matter, the post-9/11 world order, a PM's dodgy deals and secret rendition seem so small-fry now. Yeah, Johnny Worricker, you ain't seen nothing yet.
