Sex, Lies and Love Bites: The Agony Aunt Story

'I'm Philippa Perry.

'I've been a psychotherapist for 20 years

and now I've achieved my lifelong ambition

'of becoming an agony aunt.

'In this programme I'll explore the problem page's enduring

'appeal to everyone from 17th-century men

'to 1970s teenagers.'

Any lumpy envelopes, you were very cautious,

because they tended to contain bits of body parts.

'I'll pick my way through three centuries of advice on

'broken hearts, cheating partners and adolescent angst

'to uncover a revealing portrait of our social history.

'I'll immerse myself in the world

'of agony aunts and uncles and find them fighting

'on the front line of the battle of the sexes...'

Women think that willies are more complicated creatures than they are.

'..and leading a revolution in social attitudes.'

"This lady wishes to know, 'What is a blow job?'"

I said, "Leave it to me."

PHILIPPA LAUGHS

'And I'll discover just what

'makes other people's problems so irresistible.'

I'll give you the e-mail address. So, it's [email protected]...

'Denise Robertson is proof that the nation's

'agony aunts are still in huge demand.'

OK, so he has said he wants to leave?

Is he physically abusive?

Oh. OK, then.

So what is it that you want to ask Denise today?

How can you help him?

She's kept her place on the This Morning sofa

for over a quarter of a century and remains as busy as ever.

-I want to get straight on to the phone.

-We've got Sarah there.

-Hello, Sarah.

-You've been married for over 20 years,

and since the kids left home it's just been the two of you

and there's nothing there. The only...

Denise conforms to all our stereotypes

about what an agony aunt is.

She's older, wiser and is full of common sense

and gives the answer that you sort of expect to hear and want to hear.

If you ever were happy, then

it's worth exploring whether you can get that happiness back again.

Find out if there's any mileage left in the marriage

before you decide to go. If you...

Good advice is what you know anyway and might not have put into words.

Well, Denise certainly puts it into words.

'TV agony aunts like Denise may be a relatively recent

'phenomenon, but advice columnists

'have been around a lot longer than one might imagine.

'The problem page began life

'in the coffee shops of late-17th-century London.

'Aside from their wheeling and dealing, gentlemen readers

'still found time to revel in other people's agony.

'The earliest advice columns proved unputdownable because,

'just as today, they were the perfect place

'to confess unsavoury secrets.'

"Dear sir, I addicted myself to a most grievous sin.

"Although I refrain from the commission of it when I am

"awake, in my dreams I commit it and take pleasure in it.

"I desire your opinion whether it is still a sin."

The very first agony aunt wasn't an aunt at all, he was an uncle.

John Dunton, a London bookseller,

in 1691 founded the country's first problem page, the Athenian Mercury,

a periodical made up entirely of questions and answers.

But what made Dunton's invention so brilliant was that he hit upon

an idea that was a founding principle

of problem pages ever since,

that the questioner remain anonymous.

To help him in his pioneering work, Dunton founded the Athenian Society,

a panel of the great and the good - all men, naturally -

who passed down their judgment on readers' problems.

You have figures seated behind a table.

There's supposed to be 12 of them, which of course

conjures up the idea of a jury or perhaps the 12 disciples.

And in the centre you have John Dunton, who is the publisher.

He is gathering up the questions that men

and women are sending to him and his friends in a coffee house.

On the right we have John Norris, who was a Cambridge mathematician.

And on his left we have Samuel Wesley,

who was an Anglican clergyman.

But in fact they are the only three real people here.

All of the rest of the Athenian Society are fictitious.

So basically, it's John Dunton and a couple of mates in a coffee shop.

But the way he's promoting it,

it's a very canny marketing ploy, isn't it?

It is. And it captures something of the spirit of the times.

And it becomes a really national phenomenon.

People send in questions from all over the country.

And underneath them, what's this lot supposed to represent?

So, this is the kind of mass of ordinary labouring people,

men and women.

But this is definitely a picture of disorder among the lower orders.

So you have the woman, and she's trying to stab her husband,

and he's crying "Help, help, noble Athenians".

What sort of questions were they answering?

I mean, really, there were no holds barred.

I think we might be surprised at how frank

people could be in the 1690s about everyday life and their

problems with love and courtship and relationship questions.

We have a lady here who's asking,

"Where is the likeliest place to get a husband in?"

Where should she go to find a man? I really want to know.

Yes, well, they do recommend that,

"Tis likeliest place to get a lover where there are the fewest women.

"And accordingly, if she'll venture to ship herself

"to some of the plantations by the next fleet,

"if she's but anything marketable ten to one,

"but one or another there will save her longing."

-Right.

-And this is what some women were doing,

they were going off and forging new families overseas.

And it's said that if you want a man, the best place to go is Alaska.

-Even today.

-Today, yes.

And then you get these wonderful questions that children

might ask about everyday occurrences.

So, there's one here about a horse,

why a horse with a round fundament emits a square excrement.

Is it so? Is a horse's excrement really square?

It makes you look twice!

And then it goes into a great, long, quasi-scientific discussion

-about the oblong cakes.

-Oh!

People were quite upfront, really, about bodily functions.

So I see in this one. "Sphincter, anus, orifice."

It's all coming out in the horse's, erm, excrement question.

There's no squeamishness.

That's a really interesting feature of the 17th century, I think.

We tend to think these days that problem pages are a very

female-dominated area.

This is one of the really remarkable things, that in the late 1600s

you had this periodical where women

and men were thought to be interested in questions relating

to domestic life and to happiness and to love and sex and marriage,

and as many men were writing in as women with those sorts of questions.

'In the 18th century, there was an explosion in printing,

'as Britain's rising prosperity created an insatiable demand

'for newspapers and magazines.

'Well-to-do readers had a vast array of new periodicals to choose from,

'and many of them featured the tried and tested formula

'of a problem page.

'Whether the questions came from men or women, the subject of

'relations with the opposite sex remained a perennial favourite.

'A few hundred years on, the 18th-century answers

'may be showing their age, but many of the problems

'are timeless, so I want to put a few of them

'to a modern agony uncle.'

"I have a great mind to be rid of my wife.

"Never was man so enamoured as I was of her fair forehead, neck and arms.

"But, to my great astonishment,

"I find they were all the effect of art.

"When she wakes in the morning, she scarce seems young enough

"to be the mother of her whom

-"I carried to bed the night before."

-GRAHAM CHUCKLES

"What would you advise?"

He...was very naive, this man.

Er, I mean, you know, she must be caked in make-up.

She must be wearing so much of it,

I mean in that to the point where you'd suspect she's a man,

-not just an old lady.

-But everything was by candlelight.

So you could probably get away with a lot more.

-No daytime dates.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I suppose it is that thing, you know,

if you buy a miniature poodle and it grows into a dachshund, you'll

never love it quite as much as you would have the miniature poodle.

You have been sold a pup.

But also here's the thing, agony aunts

and uncles across time immemorial,

they're not always right. Because who knows if you're right?

You're in an odd position, because you're

meddling in strangers' lives and you're judging a whole

situation from one side, you're not getting both sides of the story.

You try to imagine what else is going on in-between the lines and outside.

And do you worry a lot about the advice you give,

whether it's right or it's wrong?

Sometimes. Look, sometimes I don't, because who cares, really, you know,

because the problem is sort of like, "Duh! Really? You're writing to me?"

Do you think being a man makes any difference to being an agony aunt?

With women, you can give them a male perspective on this,

because I think women overthink men far too much

and they think that men are thinking when they're not,

they're just doing.

Most men get into trouble through their wallet or their willy.

Yeah, willies do lead their poor owners astray rather a lot.

They really, really do. That's the problem.

I think women think that willies

are more complicated creatures than they are.

So don't feel TOO bad when it ends up somewhere else.

-Oh, really?

-Well, you will feel bad. Of course, you're devastated.

But... And trust is the worst...

-..thing, I mean to try and rebuild trust.

-Yeah, yeah.

I never know, really, what to tell people.

I just always kind of go, "Well, maybe over time."

But really I'm thinking, "Nah. That trust is not coming back."

'In the 17th and 18th centuries, agony aunts and uncles addressed

'the concerns of a small elite with the money to spend on magazines,

'but in the 19th century, cheaper printing and the growth

'of the middle classes brought their columns to a massive new audience.

'These upwardly mobile new readers were desperate to learn the

'do's and don'ts of polite society and turned to the Victorian

'advice columnists as the arbiters of good taste.'

"Madam, the expense of white kid gloves is ruining me,

"as they grow dirty so quickly.

"Would it be a great offence against etiquette

"to wear black lace mitts instead?"

Publishers like Samuel Beeton,

husband of the original domestic goddess, Mrs Beeton,

were quick to take advantage of this new middle-class market.

In 1852, Beeton launched the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine,

the first cheap monthly magazine aimed at the same

housewives who lapped up his wife's recipes for steamed pudding.

'Beeton was the magazine's editor and agony uncle, answering the

'usual queries about manners and morals.

'But these problem-page standards were subverted by certain

'letters which took a far darker turn.'

And you get things like, "How do I get rid of my blackheads?"

"What's the best kind of shampoo for greasy hair?"

"What colours should I wear if I've got brown hair?"

And I understand that in 1867 the problems took a different turn.

Yeah, so in 1867 something called the corset controversy started

with quite an innocent letter from a lady from Edinburgh.

She sent her daughter away to school

and didn't see her for quite a long time,

and when she saw her again her daughter had been tight-laced,

which is put into an extremely tight corset

to alter the figure permanently.

And she was really annoyed that this had been done

without her permission.

And this kind of started a huge, huge series of letters

that went on for at least two years,

almost every month people saying

that they were either for or against corsets.

And mostly, it had to be said, they were for them.

So, in the very next month, you get this letter from somebody

who calls themselves Staylace,

because everyone has a pseudonym in this.

And she, presuming it's a woman, is very, very pro tight-lacing.

And she goes on to say, "To me, the sensation of being tightly laced

"in a pair of elegant, well-made, tightly fitting corsets is superb,

"and I've never felt any evil to arise therefrom.

"I rejoice in quite a collection of these much-abused

"objects, in silk, satin and coutil of every style and colour."

I'm a little bit suspicious that this was not from a lady.

I've got a feeling this is from a gentleman who was

turned on by the Edinburgh letter and now feels that this

is like a confessional of his very, very private life...

-Yeah.

-..because he's obviously a transvestite,

and he's enjoying the display he's getting through these pages.

I mean, that's just my theory, obviously.

Yeah. Well, it's very possible, and it gave you the ability to

air your most private thoughts under a pseudonym.

You quite often get men writing in saying,

"I'm very interested in the corset question. Can you tell me more?"

I bet you did!

So, was that a one-off?

Or did this type of sort of going over into sort of male

fantasy happen ever again?

It did, actually, and in 1870

there was a controversy that was even more strong.

Uh-oh. I dread to think.

It started out being about whether it was right or wrong to

whip your children, and it quickly got into quite dark avenues.

The letter starts here and it's somebody called, "A rejoicer in the

"restoration of the rod".

So it kind of starts off saying there's a great need for

there to be kind of more discipline,

and it essentially moves on to a very,

very detailed description of a school in Kentish Town.

"She then laid the cane aside, and when he had taken off his

"trousers and had tucked his shirt, at her bidding, under his waistcoat

"and laid himself across the little bed with his person bare, she told

"him that she should birch him now, for refusing to obey her orders."

So...

Ooh!

-It kind of go...

-It goes into that detail, doesn't it,

that kind of shows that he is getting off on this?

Yeah, and, I mean, this is one of the most disturbing ones, I think.

But some of them talk about things like tying a 17-year-old

girl's hands to a peg on the wall so that you could beat her.

And it starts getting very kind of sexualised and weird.

-It's making me feel a bit sick, actually.

-It's really not nice.

So, what's going on here?

This is a polite magazine for English women, English ladies,

and it seems to be taken over by men who...

Well, it's getting a bit pornographic, I think.

It's obvious that some of the people found it quite uncomfortable,

because you get some letters, and people have written in saying,

"I used to lend this magazine to my friends, but now I don't

"really feel comfortable doing so because of some of the content".

In fact, people got kind of so upset about the fact that these

letters were appearing that Samuel Beeton decided that he was

going to separate them out from the main magazine, and he published

them in a supplement instead, which you could buy separately.

On the title page it says, "Letters addressed to the editor of the

"Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine

-"on the whipping of girls".

-Oh, my goodness.

Is this still pretending it's asking for rules to how to

discipline your children and servants?

There are genuine concerns amongst the blatant pornography, to us.

I'm actually quite annoyed, really, that men seem to have

hijacked this women's magazine.

And I think they're using the unwitting woman

as part of their audience.

They're getting off on the idea of women reading this

and not knowing what's going on. It's a form of abuse, really.

Yeah, I think that's what makes it so kind of weirdly transgressive,

that it's in this kind of very innocent problem page and that when

they were initially being published, it was in-between somebody writing in

about what shampoo was the best to use and how to cook a salmon.

When I used to volunteer for a telephone helpline,

we used to get a lot of calls from transvestites,

many of whom were genuinely worried about their compulsion.

But a few just telephoned in to tell the telephone operator what

they were wearing, how sharp their heels were, how big their hair was.

And I think that's not unlike the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine.

I think a lot of those people that wrote in did so

not only for the anonymity but also for the audience.

Aside from the occasional interloper,

agony aunts have long been the last resort of young women

with very genuine questions that nobody else could answer.

In comparison to the tight-laced Victorians,

the flappers of the new century looked like thoroughly modern

misses, but when it came to the birds and the bees, they were

just as clueless as their predecessors.

"Dear Mrs Marriott,

"I'm getting married shortly and have asked my mother to tell me

"the intimate facts of life.

"She says I am thoroughly

nasty and morbid" and shall find out soon enough. Can you help?"

At one time, agony aunts really were the keepers of secret knowledge.

They were this source of answers

to a whole list of unmentionable problems.

But far from breaking taboos, agony aunts kept their secrets,

because the replies to this sort of question were kept private.

They were only given via the stamped, addressed envelope.

Ignorant Betty was one of the lucky ones. She will have got her answer.

But the other readers, they will have been left in the dark.

'In the 19th century, agony aunts had become the trusted confidantes

'of the middle classes, but in the new century

'they gained true mass-market appeal.

'Newspapers looking to increase their circulation introduced problem

'pages to attract more female readers.

'The Daily Mirror was the first national paper to do so, in 1935,

'and others soon followed suit.

'The Mirror's agony aunt was the American Dorothy Dix, whose

'column was syndicated internationally in 300

'newspapers and boasted a readership of 60 million.

'Until now, agony aunts had been largely anonymous, but Dix

'was a new type of aunt and a major personality in her own right.

'And although newspaper advice columns were

'aimed at female readers, they were to prove just as popular with men.

'In the two decades after the end of the First World War,

universal suffrage and improving job prospects brought women new

'opportunities and new expectations of a life that offered

'more than marriage and motherhood.

'But the problem pages of the period

'reveal that a generation of young men were left bemused and bewildered

'by this new mood of female independence.

'The discovery of an agony aunt's reply to just such a letter

'from 16-year-old Len Tebbutt sparked his daughter's interest in

'the advice columns of the inter-war years.'

It's a little bit fragile.

Oh, goodness. And what is the advice?

Fairly practical, actually.

He'd clearly been writing to a girl that he'd got a bit of a crush on

and she'd not been writing back to him for several months.

And her advice was that

he was unlikely to get any satisfaction by just

continuing writing to her.

So, it was fairly, you know, down to earth.

I think, you know, there's not much chance

of this going anywhere further, really.

He must have taken the advice, because here you are.

So he must have gone on to pastures new and got better luck next time.

That was quite a long time later, I think, because he would

have been about 16, I think, which is an interesting period of

transition, when boys are beginning to get more interested in girls.

I kind of thought that agony columns were a sort of female domain.

I didn't realise that men used them so much.

Well, I think in those sorts of boys' cultures there was a great

fear of having your leg pulled.

You know, talking about personal matters, it was

kind of opening yourself up in ways that would make you look weak.

So writing to somebody who was very distant could offer

an anonymous form of advice, could be very, you know, very attractive.

They speak a lot of kind of being shy, being unconfident,

not being able to understand why women or girls weren't

necessarily interested in them, how to make a first move, how to

sort of break off a relationship, all those sorts of things.

This is from the Manchester Evening News.

The column was called The Voice Of Experience,

and this is called

"No appreciation from her".

"For two years I have been friendly with a girl who is always

"telling me of the wonderful times she had before she met me.

"I'm not in a position to give her much, and when I ask her if she

"is happy with me, she puts me off with a flippant, 'Oh, I'm all right'.

"And sometimes she says it so curtly that it hurts my feelings."

-Oh, dear!

-"I do my best to give her an enjoyable time,

"but what a difference a little appreciation would make.

"Can you advise me how to make her realise this?

"Baffled, Levenshulme."

Oh, dear! I expect he was attracted

to her hard-to-get manner and now it's wearing very thin.

It's quite interesting. There are a number of... Letters are often

described, you know... signed "Baffled" or "Fed up".

I think part of it is to do with this frustration that

girls are not sharing the same desire to settle down.

These young women are working,

there's dancing, the cinema has expanded,

and there's a new idea of dating rather than courtship,

you know, the idea that you can go out with several young men

and you don't have to settle down with the first one that you meet.

And I think some of these letters

are expressing some of that frustration.

What was the advice that the agony aunts gave to these young people?

I think they're often quite frustrated

when young men write in and express their sort of difficulty

in establishing a relationship or the fact that they're rather shy

and they find it difficult to make the first movement towards a girl.

You know, they get a bit annoyed with them.

You know, they're not being sufficiently manly, masculine.

They are always encouraged to be more assertive,

whereas the girls tend to be told to tone it down.

But there would be no return to the old certainties of a world

where men were men

and women were demure and deferential.

Instead, the outbreak of war in 1939

left agony aunts and their readers facing

a host of very modern dilemmas.

"Dear Mrs Isles, I married the best husband in the world, but whilst he

"was away in the Army I had an affair and fell pregnant.

"My husband assumes the child is his. Should I tell him the truth?"

A modern agony aunt might tell a woman who'd had an affair

and got pregnant because of it that it would be

best to come clean, but that assumption that honesty is

integral to a good relationship is a very modern one.

In the 1940s, the advice would have been,

"Stay shtoom and sweep it all under the carpet".

After the war, sales of women's magazines boomed.

On their pages, an elite

band of advice columnists reigned supreme, confident in their

ability to right the country's emotional wrongs.

In 1945, just after the war, Woman's Own appointed a new agony aunt,

Mary Grant, and she wrote a very rousing mission statement.

It's actually difficult not to sound a bit like Churchill

when I'm reading this, but here we go.

"In the last six years, we have seen what lack of understanding,

"greed and blind selfishness can do to humanity.

"Lack of understanding of ourselves and our emotional problems

"can have a more far-reaching effect than many of us dream,

"like a stone thrown into a pond,

"when the circles grow wider and wider.

"If only we can set our problems right

"before the circles ripple disturbingly out of reach..."

This reads like a rallying cry for the nation's agony aunts.

Germany may have been defeated, but there's still

the battle of the emotions to be fought and won on the home front.

Mary Grant may have advocated a new era of emotional openness,

but she left her readers in no doubt that their place remained

very firmly in the home.

Katharine Whitehorn was one of Grant's fellow journalists

at Woman's Own and witnessed at first hand

the good old-fashioned family values promoted on her page.

There were certain things, I mean, that they

had to be sort of extraordinarily prissy about.

I mean, here's the thing. There was

a marvellous one that always came about, was this,

where you got the answer but you didn't get the question.

But the one that I particularly remember was, the answer was,

"What you describe is not unusual and very few people would call it wrong".

So you were then going, "Well, what was it, anyway?"

Masturbation, but you couldn't mention it on that kind of paper.

It wasn't OK.

So, let's have a look at one of these.

"I can't trust my husband.

"My husband and I have always been happy and have one little girl.

"For the past few months, I have employed a baby-sitter.

"Last week, we went out separately,

"and when I got in he had already arrived home.

"After the baby-sitter had left, I saw that my husband had

"lipstick on his face.

"He admitted that he'd had a few drinks and had kissed the girl.

"He says it was only silliness and apologised,

"but I feel I can't trust him again."

-Oh!

-This is the reply. "I realise how upsetting an incident

"like this can be, but I think you are exaggerating its importance.

"Your husband is right in saying it was only silliness.

"Put the incident right out of your mind.

"It certainly is not worth making yourself unhappy about."

-Yeah.

-She's told by the paper, "Don't make a fuss about it".

Is that typical?

It was assumed that what women really wanted to do

was to be happily married,

and the best way to go on being that would be, on some occasions,

not to make an enormous fuss about something that they could get over.

And therefore you didn't want to say,

"Kick him in the balls and go away and get a proper job."

This was not what one was about.

Even if he has been having it off with his secretary, which he

probably has, then you don't want it to ruin your marriage.

So there's a sort of double standard in Woman's Own at this time,

like men were allowed to behave in one way, women were supposed to

behave in another. And the magazine just...

They were supposed to cope with it, yeah.

I'd like to read you some of this particular problem.

It's more of a careers-based one.

"Must I be a working wife?

"I'm engaged to a wonderful boy and we hope to marry this summer.

"We have been lucky enough to get a house,

"and so long as we do not live extravagantly

"we'll be able to manage quite well on my future husband's salary.

"The problem is that my fiance's family seem to think

"that I should carry on with my job after our marriage,

"but I feel that a wife only should work if it is essential.

"I have never had to run a home before, and

"I feel that if I went on working

"I might not be able to look after it properly."

And the opinion of Mary Grant is that,

"You are evidently quite inexperienced in domestic

"things, and the art of running a home has to be learnt.

"To run even a small house competently takes a good deal

"of time and thought,

"and I think that at first you will find it a full-time job."

How do you feel about that one?

Would anybody say that now?

I don't think they would.

To put it in those terms makes me froth at the mouth, actually.

You know, after all these years.

Thank God we've moved on a bit from that.

'In the past 60-odd years, the most dramatic change of all

'has been the agony aunt's attitude to sex.

'My forebears of the '50s avoided any mention of trouble in the

'bedroom, but today sex takes pride of place on the problem page.'

I hope I brought the right clothes, Laura.

This is a sort of wrap dress thing.

-Yes, that's quite Dear Deidre, yeah.

-It's the only dress I've got.

-That's the only dress you've got?

-The only girlie dress I've got.

-Wow.

-I mostly have big shifts.

-OK. Suck it and see.

I also brought a black slip...

I don't think you'll be needing that.

..in case there was a lovely bedroom scene.

I thought, you know...

-It's also very long.

-I'd have to rewrite the story, so probably not.

You're shuddering. All right, OK. OK, right.

Out, out, out! I'll go and get changed, then.

'I've been given a starring role

'in the Sun's Dear Deidre Photo Casebook,

'which brings readers' problems to life

'in photo stories run over the course of a week.'

There!

'The Photo Casebook is one of the Sun's most popular features

'and has been going strong for over 20 years.'

Right...

'I'm playing Edie, who makes the shocking discovery

'that her daughter's new boyfriend Jamie is in fact a woman...'

Gesture with your left hand, Philippa.

'..and has to break the news to her homophobic husband.'

So, um, right, Philippa, you're doing something strange with your feet.

She's not a natural.

Right.

Two, three.

Soph, you're going to tell your mum that you're a lesbian.

Not going to wear those glasses, are you?

No, I wouldn't dream of it.

-They're not very Dear Deidre.

-No.

I don't want to be unkind about your glasses, but, you know...

-Here we go.

-OK.

That's it.

So, you've got to look really angry.

Come off it, love. You can't choose your sexuality, you know.

Philippa, look a bit worried.

"I can't tell a lie, Crystal, I am disappointed."

-OK.

-Sophie, mouth open.

What's the most common question that you play in the Casebook?

The recurring theme that always comes up is infidelity with

members of the same sex, or the opposite sex, or whatever.

But because it takes so many forms, you can

get plenty of material out of it.

I think men like looking at the pictures,

they have absolutely no idea what's going on in the story,

but women read the story quite closely.

There's an awful lot of bedroom scenes, aren't there?

Well...

I don't always have bed scenes as such.

I sometimes have a woman getting ready to go out,

but I do always have a girl in her lingerie.

You know, that's the recurring theme, is the girl in her underwear.

Not necessarily always the girl in bed.

But also, lots of problems ARE based around sex.

You know, "I can't get it up," or, you know,

"I've turned the other way," or whatever.

They are sexual in nature, a lot of people's problems.

So, you know, that's what we're addressing.

-I'm going to do the scenes with your daughter...

-And her girlfriend.

-..and her girlfriend.

-In bed? In their bras?

Is that OK?

Yeah. Why can't I get in bed with my bra?

You're looking at the phone saying, "Oh, my gosh, it's my dad.

"Shall I answer?"

Rach, I would like to be able to see a bit more of you, so push...

Exactly. Right.

Three...

And with that left hand, Sophie, just say,

"Dad, I beg you, give me a chance."

Bring your left hand into the picture a bit.

Evelyn Home was the agony aunt for Woman magazine in the 1950s,

and she wasn't allowed to say the word "bottom" in her column,

as in "bottom of the garden" or "bottom of the saucepan".

It was...too saucy.

It wasn't until the late '60s, early '70s that the agony aunts

walked through the bedroom door and started to give sexual advice.

Right, this is the famous Dear Deidre sad picture,

because you're torn now between your husband and your daughter.

Look up a little bit, Philippa.

Make a fist rather than the whole hand. That's it.

By today's standards, the Photo Casebook is pretty tame.

But not so long ago, it would have been considered positively racy.

The sexual revolution on the problem page was prompted by social changes

like the introduction of the pill in 1961 and the legalisation of

abortion and decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

Far from remaining anonymous, a new breed of frank and fearless

agony aunts became household names.

Queen bee of the '70s problem page was Marje Proops,

advice columnist for the Mirror, then the biggest-selling

daily paper in the Western world.

People are so ignorant. They are abysmally ignorant about sex.

And combined with a lack of education about contraceptives,

about everything relating to sex...

..produces 50,000 problems a year for me.

Marje's great rival was Claire Rayner,

who started her career as a nurse in the '50s,

and then in the '60s became a crusading advice columnist

for Woman's Own and teen magazines Rave and Petticoat.

Claire Rayner was no holds barred when it came to giving

her teenage readers of Petticoat magazine some advice.

She really got the backs up of moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse,

who actually branded her the Antichrist.

So, what was Mary getting so upset about?

Well, I think it might have been letters like these,

about masturbation.

"I am sure no-one else in the world is like me.

"It has taken me a year to pluck up the courage to write this letter.

"I am 16 and I have masturbated all my life,

"although I didn't know what I was doing.

"Lately I told a friend about it, and she was horrified.

"She said I will go blind and deaf and that my skin will become pitted

"and it stunts your growth and makes you ugly.

"She says if you've masturbated for a long time

"you can never have children.

"I can't believe I have ruined my life about this."

And actually, in response to this,

Claire doesn't just give reassurance, she's really angry,

and she says, "All letters like this make me seethe with anger.

"Not because of the sad people who have written them, but because

"of the stupid, destructive rubbish they have been lumbered with.

"Look, masturbation is not wrong.

"Everybody does it at some time or another."

This is more than reassurance, this is rabble-rousing.

This is a call to arms.

Or at least to fingers.

There's no-one else, is there?

It's all wrong. I mean, it shouldn't be like this.

It makes me really angry that people of 15, 16 and 17 still

in touch with school should have to write to a total stranger like me.

'In 1973, Claire hit the big time

'when she became agony aunt for the Sun.

'Writing for a tabloid brought her no-nonsense sex advice

'to a huge new audience.

'But even with a readership of millions, she never

'lost her very personal approach.'

Her standards book was her way of answering every letter.

She was very insistent that the thousand or so letters a week

that she got should get an answer that had her imprint upon them.

But it would be impossible to do

if you literally answered every single one, and what she'd done

was come up with a set of standard answers to standard problems.

So under C it goes circumcision, contraception, climax, crabs,

pubic...

cross-dressing.

Then you get to D, which is discharge after intercourse.

There's a lot of them.

Claire was working at the golden age of agony aunts,

and that sort of level of reach doesn't really exist any more.

The glorious thing about those years of the '60s,

'70s and '80s is you could be a font of all knowledge.

You could sit on your problem page and everything would come to you.

How did the family business run?

She had her office at the front of the house.

My father, who was her manager, was next door.

She would advertise a leaflet.

Say somebody had written in, and at the end of her answer,

a short answer, you know,

"If you want a leaflet on this, write in to PO Box" blah, blah, blah.

Literally sacks of mail would be dropped in the hall.

And sometimes you'd just have a single line saying,

"Please send me the leaflet,"

and other times you would get their whole life story,

which would end with, "Please send the leaflet".

My job was to slit open all the envelopes,

check that they didn't need something else,

and if they did need something else, to put it on one side

for my mother to attend to.

Disgraceful, this, isn't it? I was 10, 11, 12 when I was doing this.

And sometimes you'd go, "Well, that's interesting. Oh!"

I learnt an awful lot.

And she's using those letters as a jumping-off point to do

something bigger.

She was one of the first people to write in great

detail about homosexuality in the '70s.

Gay men, lesbian women were writing in,

concerned about how they felt about themselves and how the rest

of society would deal with them, how their families would deal with them.

And she found a way to reassure them that they were normal

and that everybody else had a problem, not them.

Our Christmases were basically gays, Jews and actors,

people who had nowhere else to go.

And she would gather them unto her, waifs and strays.

You've turned out straight, Jay.

That must probably have been a huge disappointment to my mother, yeah!

PHILIPPA LAUGHS

But it was, you know, it was a very, very open household.

And she was something of a pioneer

when it came to giving frank sexual advice.

She was an extraordinarily stroppy woman, and if you told her

that you couldn't do something, she'd find a way to do it.

She hated silence about things, and she wanted to kick against it.

Some people might think that intercourse with a condom

ought to be a low risk. Why isn't it? Claire Rayner.

Well, it is if you use the right equipment and use it properly.

First of all, choose quality. Look for the kite mark.

A chap wrote to Claire to say that he was

concerned about the shape of his erection.

He could have taken a Polaroid and sent it in so she could have

a look and tell him it was...but that obviously would be unbecoming.

So he carved it lovingly out of wood and polished it up.

When the advent of safe sex and condom use

came along in the early '80s, when we first begin to understood the

challenges of AIDS, she used that to demonstrate putting a condom on.

So what is the proper way to use a condom?

I need a model. I've got this. A reader sent me this when I published

a letter from a boy who was afraid he didn't measure up,

and he said he hadn't measured up when he was a lad. Look at him now.

So we'll use that as a model. It's my paperweight. Right...

So, you pinch that firmly to push the air out of the way

and apply the end, the open end of the...

obviously, of the condom to the erect penis.

And you need to do it in good time,

I mean as soon as a man's got an erection

and well before, er, inserting it into the vagina.

Now, this is a rather wooden, hard penis.

A nice human one is soft and easier to handle.

In this new age of openness, one of the last taboos of the problem

page was finally shattered as agony aunts at last published

letters from readers confused about their sexuality.

"Dear Claire, I met a girl at the local tennis club, and we get on

"really well.

"But I worry about the male sexual fantasies I indulge in when

"I'm with her.

"Could I have been prejudiced against relationships with the

"opposite sex by my experiences at my very expensive public school?"

'Trailblazers like Claire Rayner had put sex on the agony aunts' agenda,

'although some of her colleagues struggled to

'answer the more upfront questions they received

'and some readers fretted that they weren't having nearly as much fun

'as they should be.'

In the early '70s,

suddenly there were words like "penis" and "vagina"

and "orgasm" and "premature ejaculation" on the page.

And it was absolutely extraordinary,

because although I was quite a rackety girl in the '60s,

I still found it very difficult to...

You know, I mean, I didn't like to...

None of us would want to actually use the word "vagina".

And indeed I don't think today one actually bandies

the word around every day.

But one was expected to be quite frank in the page.

People would write in, because it was as if a cork

had come out of a champagne bottle.

They'd been so repressed about sex for so long,

suddenly every single question was about sex.

Can you give me an example of the sort of letter you had to answer?

It was painful. People would write saying, "Where is my G-spot?"

You know, and I'd be there, sort of, "I don't know where your G-spot is".

And it was extremely hard for me.

One woman wrote in saying, "How many calories are there in semen?"

I mean, it was a difficult one to answer.

Did you have help answering the questions?

I did, but unfortunately I'd inherited the letter answerers,

who were 80-year-old spinsters.

And one of them actually died at her desk.

And these women were absolutely sweet

and they were adept at answering any question like

"Do I take my gloves off when shaking hands with a bishop?",

or, "How do I eat an avocado pear?"

There was actually a leaflet we had on how to eat an avocado pear.

But of course they were baffled by these, erm, sex questions.

And they'd come into me holding these letters like used tissues,

saying, "What do I...? We don't understand."

I always remember one of them coming into my room

looking extremely worried, saying, "How can I answer this?"

And I said, "What's it about?"

She said, "This lady wishes to know, 'What is a blow job?'"

I said, "Leave it to me."

PHILIPPA LAUGHS

We've gone from a time in the early '60s

when sex isn't discussed at all on the problem page to a time,

just ten years later, when it's the main thing.

Yes, and what was interesting was that there was a huge

pressure on women when sex wasn't discussed, of course,

because there was no knowledge at all.

And the number of girls who must have gone to bed sick with worry,

thinking that they were going to get pregnant

because they'd kissed their boyfriends.

And that was one kind of pressure that you had then,

terror of sex, and probably a great deal of anxiety surrounding it.

But then, when the sexual revolution came in, there was another

kind of anxiety, which was that you weren't having enough,

that it wasn't good enough, you weren't having enough orgasms,

you weren't doing it, you know, on the kitchen table.

I remember there was a lot of talk about, you know,

"You must do it in every room in the house,"

and somehow the kitchen table always came into it.

There seemed to be far too much attention

paid to sex and the implication that if you didn't have

a good sex life you were going to get ill and possibly get cancer,

that certainly if you didn't have simultaneous orgasms, you and your

husband were totally incompatible, and, you know, you were doomed.

There was a terrible kind of compulsory feeling about sex,

that it had to be had and enjoyed or...

Mm, there's a sort of tyranny about it.

Well, a terrible tyranny, yes.

"You will like sex, whether you like it or not."

-"You will orgasm simultaneously!"

-Yes, exactly.

And again, however much I wrote saying, "Don't worry,

"don't worry, don't worry," it didn't seem to make any difference.

'But these alarming new "anything goes" attitudes had no place

'in the last bastions of traditionalism.

'Jackie magazine, for one,

'stuck with the lighter side of teenage angst.

'Jackie was launched in 1964, and by the '70s, it was the

'country's most popular teen magazine,

'shifting over half a million copies a week.'

When I was a teenager growing up in the 1970s, I was at an all-girls'

boarding school, and boys were like alien creatures to me.

And how I found out about the world of boys was through

the pages of Jackie magazine and the agony aunts, Cathy and Claire.

They replied to 100 letters a day,

and they sent individual replies to every reader that wrote in.

And I've got a few of the copies of their replies here.

Now, here's some advice for everyone out there.

"Dear Jackie, love bites usually go away surprisingly quickly.

"There is no possibility of contracting cancer.

"Meanwhile, try covering them up with Max Factor's Erace Plus..."

- that's a good tip - "and don't let it happen again.

"Love, Cathy and Claire."

Quite a moralistic tone there at the end of that one.

"Dear Karen, well, we passed your photo round the office,

"and three boys agreed

"there was absolutely nothing wrong with your looks,

"while the other three thought you were pretty but slightly plump."

Poor Karen. I don't know what I would have done if I'd got that.

"Hope we've helped! Love, Cathy and Claire."

Oh, I love this one. "Dear Wendy,

"we agree that Lesley is being a bitch, love, and we suggest

"that you have the whole thing out in the open with her."

Ooh, that's going to be one to watch, isn't it?

Cathy and Claire's readers confided everything to them,

but Cathy and Claire themselves were keeping two pretty big secrets.

The first one was although they invited readers to write

to them at this glamorous London office, actually they did all

the replies from Dundee, where the Jackie offices were.

They used to get the whole bag of letters, send them up to Dundee.

They used to reply to them there,

and then they'd send the bag back down to London,

so all the letters could be sent out with a London postmark.

And their other big secret

was that Cathy and Claire didn't exist at all.

Hundreds of miles from swinging London, in the Dundee office

of Jackie publisher DC Thomson,

a succession of young female journalists played the parts

of Cathy and Claire.

They were kept under close watch to ensure they adhered to the

publisher's strict moral code.

When I was Cathy and Claire, I saw myself not as their mother

or their teacher or a nurse,

I saw myself as their big sister.

They didn't feel they can speak to their mums,

they didn't feel they can speak to their teachers

and all their friends. I mean, there was no social media.

You know, now you would Google a problem,

but we were Google, you know. We were the '80s Google, really.

They were sitting there almost waiting for puberty to hit, like

some kind of time bomb,

and they didn't know what was going to happen.

They didn't have sex education, mainly, at schools.

We were always wary of 3D envelopes.

3D envelopes?

Any lumpy envelopes, you were very cautious,

because they tended to contain bits of body parts that had fallen off.

So usually attached to Sellotape.

There was a time when I opened an envelope and a 1/2p fell out.

And I kind of randomly just picked it up

and absent-mindedly flipped it in my hand, and I read the letter.

And the letter said, "Dear Cathy and Claire, I have genital warts,

"I measured them with this 1/2p coin."

PHILIPPA LAUGHS

So cue a rush to the toilets to do a Lady Macbeth on my hands.

Sandy, I think this must have been one of yours.

-Oh, yes.

-"They hate the boy I love.

"Dear Cathy and Claire,

"Dick and I are planning to get engaged at Christmas.

"I've saved up a lot of money.

"I know I'm only 16 and they say I'm too young."

What did I say?

You said, "Try and see your parents' point of view, love."

Yes, that's right, yes.

The parents had the authority. We were just giving advice.

I did have a couple of instances with parents phoning the office...

-Really?

-..and saying, "I believe my daughter's written in,

"and I'd like to know what she's written."

You know, you had this angry parent saying, "Are you Cathy?

"Are you Claire?" You know?

I'd say, "No, I'm sorry, I'm the cleaner. They've all gone home."

When it came to talking about

sex, how much were you allowed to say?

You were allowed to say "heavy petting" or "love bites".

You might also get away with the occasional "grope".

But you would have letters on the Cathy and Claire page that said,

"I think I'm pregnant,"

but you would never have any letters saying how they got to be pregnant.

They would read that someone was pregnant

or read about heavy petting, but there was nothing in-between.

So as far as they were concerned, if they had heavy petting,

they would be pregnant. So perhaps it was our fault.

In the '70s, Jackie sort of held sway over teenage sexuality,

love bites and everything.

But in the '80s, there were a lot of new magazines onto

the market like, for instance, Just 17,

and they were a lot more candid about sex.

What was that like for Cathy and Claire?

Well, Just 17 were our biggest rivals.

And while we could compete with them on some levels, with the pop

and the fashion, there was a great sense of frustration

when it came to things like the problem pages,

because they were allowed to say so much more

and we were still stuck in that, you know, '70s vibe.

But readers had moved on, quite considerably, and we

started to lose a lot of readers, because the advice they needed

and wanted was being provided by Just 17 and other magazines,

who could speak about pregnancy, who could, you know...

They kept up with the cultural times.

-Absolutely.

-Jackie didn't.

-Yeah.

She was just this girl stuck in the '70s with her love bites and her...

-Flared trousers.

-..flared trousers and...

-And her knitting patterns.

-And her knitting patterns!

'Today's agony aunts no longer have the same clout as those

'queens of the problem page from the '60s, '70s and '80s.

'But the one who comes closest

'works from an office hidden away in the leafy Home Counties.

'The Sun's Dear Deidre has been dispensing advice for the past

'34 years and boasts by far the country's biggest readership.'

This is today's problem, and I'd say it's fairly typical.

So I have "Steamy love triangle with mate's girl".

-That's quite a sexy one, isn't it?

-It absolutely is.

We've got a family row here, a mum who's very upset because she's

fallen out with her grown-up daughter and partner over the kids.

And we've got someone who was abused by his baby-sitter

when he was young.

Just always, of course, a very full page.

The problem page is one of the most popular parts of the paper.

I mean, it creates footfall, as they say these days.

I do get about, like, 100 problems a day, and I need that coming in.

I mean, out of that, I'm going to need seven

every weekday, ten on Saturdays. That's a lot of copy to be finding.

It's a lot of copy, so, yeah.

And you need a spread of subjects and interests all the time.

How has the column changed since you've been doing it?

I mean, I think human nature actually evolves very, very slowly.

So while I've been doing this job for over 30 years,

human nature does not change.

I feel as though the underlying issues,

like loneliness or difficulty in forming a relationship,

are the same, but the internet has given

so much more scope for ways this can express itself.

'Deidre's promise of an answer

'to every problem ensures that her column remains a thriving cottage

'industry, just as it was in her predecessor Claire Rayner's day.'

So, here we have my leaflet list.

This is the whole 250 of them, divided into different sections.

So you start off, we've got a whole section on abuse,

going from child abuse, abuse of partners and rape.

And then everything to do with appearance,

so it's breasts and cosmetic surgery, tattoos, skin, hair, weight.

Dependence, so drink, smoking, gambling, drugs.

F for family. Adoption...

'An endless stream of problems that shows no sign of slowing.'

"Mum, Jamie isn't who you think."

"I don't understand. Is Jamie a woman?"

"So Crystal's chosen her girlfriend over us.

"Well, she's no daughter of mine!"

"Bob's making me choose between him and Crystal. I can't cope."

'Even at a time when advice is more easily available than ever before,

'the problem page is often still our first port of call.'

The golden age of agony aunts may have passed, but after three

centuries I don't think we'll ever learn to live without them, because

the best agony aunts offer something that Google can't,

a relationship,

even if it is at arm's length.

And another reason they may be sticking around a while yet is

because I don't think we'll ever tire

of reading about other people's problems...

especially if they make us

feel a little bit more smug about our own lives.