Phone Sex has been hugely popular for many decades now, But like everything else in our modern world, it has changed and evolved amazingly over the years. Today we reveal the colourful history of British phone sex, which eventually led to the creation of Babestation and other adult sex chat-based babe channels. Get ready to learn a whole load of stuff you never knew!
There are many fables in the phone sex industry, which are recounted fondly and with pride. But the thing is, many of the unlikely stories are actually true! One such story is that in early 1980s a couple of infamous guys, who supposedly previously worked as telecom engineers, installed a series of telephone lines into an unused public toilet. At the end of each line, was a cassette player. One line and one cassette player per toilet cubicle! Each cassette player played a looped recorded story. The engineers had worked out how to answer the lines automatically, so that if someone rang the line, the phone would ring a couple of times and then a story would be played out. Each story was recorded by a girl with a really sexy voice, who would recount her sexual experiences or a fantasy story in fairly graphic detail. However, expletive terms like the word “Fuck”, were not used. Anal sex was also illegal at this time, so it was not mentioned. Towards the end of the story, which usually lasted around 3 minutes, there would be a lot of moaning and heavy breathing as the girl “reached orgasm” while her story reached its climax.
At this time, a mobile phone was about as big as a house. Well not quite, but often they had huge, heavy batteries that would last for 6-8 hours if you were lucky. So heavy in fact, that many women could not manage to carry a mobile phone on their own! Most people didn’t even know what a mobile phone was and only high-flyers had a car phone (which, by the way, was also big and clunky.)
British telecom had already invented premium rate billing, but the lines were not used for adult related or phone sex purposes. So, it took these smart, entrepreneurial types quite a lot of guts to have a go at providing the first ever paid-for, premium billed, phone sex services. Using the BT premium rate number billing, they loaded the lines up with recorded stories, initially in a host of “underground” places, to avoid being tracked down. British Telecom didn’t see that one coming! Initially, the phone numbers were printed on cards and left in phone boxes, handed out outside nightclubs, placed discreetly in bars. They were also advertised in the local newspapers in the personal columns.
Another issue was to get the recordings in the first place. How could telephone engineers ask real women to write and record phone sex stories? That kind of thing simply wasn’t done. It was not an easy thing to find willing candidates. Things were also hotting up, as more entrepreneurs caught on to the fact that there was big booming business to be had.
In fact, most of the hundreds of initial phone sex recordings were created by two women (completely independently of each other) who put on lots of different accents and voices. The recordings were sped up, slowed down or had effects added, so the punters couldn’t tell it was the same girls. All the same, the stories were often pretty good and were definitely arousing. The girls sounded like they were well into their saucy stories and their orgasms sounded genuine enough. People loved them and called in droves to listen in. Phone sex lines started making scandalous headlines in the tabloids.
British Telecom had a job tracking down which numbers actually were used for phone sex purposes. When they did, they would disconnect the lines. But our entrepreneurial guys would often find a way round that and had 100s of numbers already lined up. Eventually, British Telecom invented the 0898 prefix, to be used for adult purposes only.
Now that this was legal, the British phone sex industry was officially well on its way. Adult magazines such as Penthouse and Mayfair were far and few between at this time, but the entrepreneurs got in and published full pages of 0898 phone sex lines. These were often busy-looking ads with something for everyone. Because the lines were regulated, both the ads and the content were quite suggestive with titles such as “French maid polishes you knob” or “ “Busty college girl loves it hard.” Full nudity was not allowed in the ads and any open legs had a little star placed to cover up the girls “bits.”
Now imagine you are a guy. You have never heard a woman talking sexily down a phone line. You had never thought about phone sex. All you could do is to have a girlfriend, or have a one-night stand, buy your copy of Penthouse and look at the pictures, or read one of the dirty stories in there. Or you could buy one of David Sullivan’s porn films in a sex shop, or order one by post. Now, the combination of being able to look at the pictures in a soft porn mag, plus listen to a real girl having an orgasm down a phoneline and clearly enjoying talking about sex, bought a new dimension for hundreds of thousands of British males. Phone sex was big business. The initial entrepreneurs were soon driving round in mercs. More entrepreneurs jumped onto the band wagon.
Northern and Shell, who had the licence to produce Penthouse in the UK started producing reams of new adult mags to cater for the incredible boom of 0898 phone sex advertising. Electric Blue, Asian Babes, you name it, they made it. And as the ads increased, so did the punters. 0898 was everywhere.
By now, one of the two initial girls that produced phone sex recordings had a full studio going on in her cellar in East London. Now in her 50s, we tracked her down. She told us; “When I was first approached by Mike and Steve (names changed for this article), I had no clue what to write. They offered me £500 to write and record 10 phone sex scripts that were 3 minutes long each. £500 as a huge amount of money for a few hours work! I wrote the scripts anyway, then drove up to Cambridge, where they had a recording studio. I recorded the stories without them saying a word. I had no idea if what I was doing was good or bad. They put the recordings on their phone lines and within a week, they came back and asked me for 20 more.”
Soon, she was writing hundreds of scripts a week for different companies. She said “I would wake up, make a cup of tea, then get writing my scripts. I had a studio built in my cellar and very soon, I could mix different tracks. So now I could do a two-track recording with two girls having sex together. But in fact, both of the girls were me.” It was now possible to add sound effects too “ I used to love adding whipcracks to the domination recordings. We even did watersports recordings. It took 2 of us to pour water into a series of jugs to make it sound real!”
Within a year, this newly professional phone sex artist was training up new artists, teaching them how to sound like they were having a genuine orgasm, recruiting them among her friends and churning out 100s of recordings every month. ” People couldn’t get enough of the phone sex stories. I was driving around in a cabriolet, I’d never had one of those before.”
As competition increased and the 0898 phone sex industry boomed, something else was brewing in the background. Several entrepreneurial women had by now also arrived on the phone sex scene. Using the chunky mobile phones that existed and a credit card facility that belonged to a florist or other small business, these ladies would discreetly advertise live phone sex using a mobile number. Punters would call the phonesex number, speak to a “receptionist” (who was often the advertiser herself) and give their credit card details over the phone. A selected girl would then call the punter back and give him live phone sex. These were also very lucrative businesses, which were on the up and up.
Eventually this combination of premium rate billing and live phone sex, would evolve into the British live phone sex industry and later, the live cam business. But the road to achieving that, was yet long and adventurous. Want to know more? Cos now the story starts getting really juicy! Read our next installment here
Check out Babesttaion video for hot vids of Babestation's phone sex babes.
