Intro: Really let's be fair and balanced and see if female reporter Nell Frizzle can do a companion piece. What’s behind the sudden rise in penises on screen? And who do the stars turn to when they need a great prosthetic member? We meet the master craftsman who tailors each stand-in schlong like a bespoke suit. . .
Hollywood’s No 1 penis-maker: ‘Chris Hemsworth keeps his next to Thor’s hammer!’
"If you’ve been watching any of the major American TV series recently, you may have noticed some new members in the cast. Some notable members. Some lower members. From the animatronic talking todger of Pam & Tommy to the bathroom bugle bared by Harry Goldenblatt in And Just Like That …, plus a whole panoply in the latest season of Euphoria, we seem to have entered a dust storm of dick.
Despite having instances of full-frontal female nudity on screen since the experimental Dutch TV show Hoepla in 1967, the male equivalent seems to have lagged behind for several decades. This may have been partly caused by so-called obscenity laws, which prohibited the broadcast of an erect penis on national TV. Indeed, it wasn’t until August 2020 that British viewers got their first glimpse of an erection on telly, as part of Channel 4’s documentary Me and My Penis. British viewers have also been treated to glimpses of male nudity, even the odd nubbin, in a range of shows for many years – from War and Peace to Top Boy, from Misfits to Cucumber. Flaccid, yes. Fleeting, yes. But they were there. . .
Perhaps what sets the recent American dongs apart is their idiosyncrasy. Even flaccid, the penis in And Just Like That … looked like a demi-baguette, while Pam & Tommy’s soliloquising sausage (inspired by Tommy Lee’s autobiography, in which the Mötley Crüe drummer chats to his penis) is more like something from the Muppet stable than a realistic appendage. Dear reader, it talks.
But who are the people who make this magic happen? . .
In real life, most penises come with their own set of inbuilt special effects: urination, erection, ejaculation. Yet these aren’t exactly a regular feature of television. Is that prudishness – or because of the technical difficulty? “I’ve never been called on to do a soft penis to an erect penis on screen,” says Mungle. “I’m sure that day will come. However, I worked with Matt Lucas and David Walliams on Little Britain USA and they had a sketch about two workout buddies. We had to sculpt whole body suits for them in latex: they come into the locker room, drop their towels and, well, they have extremely small penises.”
This, I presume, is where most actors will be keen to point out that a prosthetic is needed. . .
why does there seem to have been such a ramping up of rampant male nudity in the last year? Are we genuinely experiencing a change in attitude? Perhaps the increase in visible male genitals is an attempt to counterbalance the sheer number of breasts that have been on TV for years, most notably in such shows as Game of Thrones. Or perhaps TV is finally just catching up with the much less prudish world of theatre. “As an actor,” says Pritchard, “going to do that scene that day, I was far more concerned with the performance than the fact everyone could see my willy. I’ve been naked on stage a couple of times. In fact, I did a play where all five of us were naked all the way through. After the first two minutes, the story takes over and it stops being a thing.”
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