It’s a new year and we start 2026 with Under the Counter being featured on the latest episode of the relaunched podcast Soho Bites. Back in November I was asked by Dom to talk about Soho’s relationship with pornography as part of an episode on Neil Jordan’s wonderful film Mona Lisa (1986), which also features the memories of Soho-based film producer Colin Vaines. There’s a sequence halfway through the film where Bob Hoskins walks through Soho, visiting some of clip joints and sex shops. These were the actual premises, not mocked up studio sets, making it a valuable visual record of what Soho was like just before the Greater London (General Powers) Act 1986 Section 12, amended the Local Government (miscellaneous provisions) Act 1982 and ultimately resulted in the closure of many sex-related premises in the dirty square mile. Hoskins visits one Maltese owned sex shop on Tisbury Court and, as the image above shows, reveals what the inside of a shop looked like at this time, mainly selling softcore magazines and videos – what might have been lurking under the counter, I wonder?
In preparation for the interview, I spoke to my friend Dave, who has been involved in running sex shops in Soho since the late 1970s. He recalled the filming of the sequence fondly:
[David] Sullivan had the corner shop. The Malts had another shop, we had our shop. And so they rocked up with the lights, and said ‘we’re closing the court; we’re gonna do some filming.’ I wasn’t there myself, but my manager was calling me and I said, ‘Well, they can’t just close the courtway. No, they’re gonna be filming from 12am onwards, but they want us to stay there.’ So I said, ‘Well, ask for some money’. And they walked around, but they never really offered that much money. So all the boys stayed there. So in the meantime, as they’re setting up the lights and setting up the scenes, Bob Hoskins appeared. He was chatting to the boys, ‘Hello boys, how you going?’ […] So a lot of the boys in the sex shops had photographs with Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine. And so when it got round to shooting, they said, ‘We want all the lights on, so it looks good.’ They never paid us enough money. So we all agreed as they started to film, we just turned all our lights off and they went, ‘Man, you can’t do that. You can’t do that.’ Westminster Council were there as well: ‘What are you doing? You can’t do that.’ So everything all got a bit heated. Then all of a sudden some guy appeared with a big fat envelope, and he started handing out cash. I think we got £700 and every other shop did. They just handed out cash and I think the boys ended up staying there till about 4am in the morning [..] so that’s what happened on that night.
With Soho now a very different place, the sequence reads less as atmosphere and more as record. Mona Lisa captures a stretch of Soho that has since been cleaned up and gentrified, when sex shops were an ordinary part of the area’s working life. Dave’s recollection situates the sequence in the everyday realities of Soho at the time. You can listen to the episode below:
Terry Stephens
January 7, 2026 — 9:02 pm
Fascinating podcast. Some of us remember the area well during the 90s advertising with Paul Raymond Publications when they were at 2 Archer Street
Some of us used to supply the shops when they got raided and needed replacement stock to pay the exorbitant rents being charged by landlords then
We certainly know more about producing movies around this era