Charlie has been a cameraman at Babestation for two weeks. He has a mullet. He is 20. Tonight, he is filming Priya Young. Priya joined Babestation in 2009 with her twin sister Preeti. They are now 36. At 10pm, when Priya’s show goes live, men will pay £1.50 a minute for her to listen to their mid-wank ramblings. “Mr Sticky” with his custard-in-rectum fantasy. “Andrew” who screams “I’M GOING TO GET YOU PREGNANT” down the phone.
If the job has a rub, Charlie says, it is the guys. Employed at Britain’s premier adult television brand, filming the models, he has to overhear customers work through their grim kinks. Worse: he helps to turn them on. He zooms and he pans on the women. From 10pm until 5.30am, he conducts hundreds of masturbating men.
Priya, of course, has to actually talk to the customers. She is sitting topless on a worn wooden desk in a mocked-up mid-century study in a Great Man’s home. The look is meticulous; a bookshelf next to the desk contains a first edition of Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon. The studios, in fact, are on an industrial estate in Milton Keynes.
Tonight, around 10 models are working in various sets. Babestation airs on Sky, Virgin and Freeview, and all the women are being streamed on www.babestation.tv. Peak masturbating hours run through the night until 4am, and, off-air, Priya says she wants to be done before the morning’s traffic. Then she is live. She smiles, Charlie locks onto her chest, the first caller is patched through and she greets him with motherly tones and long vowels. She calls him “baby”.
I started going to the Babestation studios a few months ago. I calculated the channel wouldn’t be around much longer, and I thought I could be bedside at its death. Babestation’s peers, after all, passed a decade back. Page Three went in 2015, followed by that bit of Soccer AM where guys heckled “GREAT AGE!” at teenage female football fans. We decided that public objectification was backward, then accepted a replacement sexual culture that was incalculably more extreme: “Breeding Missions”; “Plug Talk”; “2,000 men in 24 hours — Bonnie Blue’s Crazy New Stunt”.
Babestation ended up somehow both too vulgar and too timid for our modern age. It fell into a gap. I wanted to speak to the people who still worked there, outcast from our pornographic tastes. I emailed its executives asking if I could visit. They said sure.
Emerald is putting on makeup in the common area before Priya goes live. She is 32. (Single names in this story are fictitious; full names are real.) The floor is carpeted black and the walls are tacky pink and we sit at a table and get into her life.
Emerald says Babestation approached her on Instagram about five years ago, when she worked in PR. They asked if she fancied joining and she thought why not, she’d check it out, have a conversation. They showed her the money she could make. “It was,” she says, “a no-brainer.” She works three nights a week, and can make up to £2,000 for each one. Emerald’s partner doesn't love that she does it. But what can he say?
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