Like a fever dream taken directly from the pages of Viz comic but created by Chris Morris, Dogging Tales from 2013, remains one of the most unforgettable TV documentaries of the last twenty years.
Screened as part of Channel 4’s True Stories strand, and in actual fact directed by Leo Maguire, it was more Jeremy Kyle rather than Louis Theroux, bearing a prurience and slight queasiness towards sexual kinks.
For a while, it seemed as though the practice of dogging – parking your car and watching various people having sex in “well-known beauty spots” as our tabloid newspapers always term them-became as strangely institutionalised as fish and chips, sarcasm and rain on a bank holiday Monday.
Participants who agreed to be interviewed did so anonymously in their living rooms, clad in cheap looking masks and cheerily relaying how “the missus” got them into it, before passing round the tea and custard creams.Glamorous, it was not.
A unique, strange but compelling film. Two million viewers tuned in. I believe that the phrase is, ‘enough said’.
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