What A Bunch Of Wankers

Richard Wilkins: A trip to London next month?

Are you a wild one? Looking to meet new people? Perhaps you're a little lonely and looking for some likeminded individuals... If so, I hope you're in the Greater London area early next month for Masturbate-a-thon 2006. (Courtesy of The Guardian):

Channel 4 is to bring mass public masturbation to the small screen.

The broadcaster - once led by Michael Grade, dubbed "pornographer in chief" by the Daily Mail - has commissioned a documentary about the UK's first "Masturbate-a-thon" as part of a series of programmes dubbed "Wank Week", MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

In what must surely be one of the summer's more bizarre events, hundreds of people are expected to gather in a hall in central London on August 5 to pleasure themselves in aid of charity.

The organiser of the event, the San Francisco-based Centre for Sex and Culture, has run mass masturbation events in the US for the past five years to raise money for safe sex groups and plans to replicate the formula in the UK.

The event will encourage Londoners - both male and female - to sign up sponsors and head to Clerkenwell in order to masturbate in front of hundreds of others.

Prizes will be on offer for those who clock up the most orgasms and those who can masturbate the longest - the current record, according to the organisers, is a chafing eight-and-a-half hours.

It takes the Yanks to come up with an idea like this and attempt pull it off. (Multiple puns very much intended.) Still, for me, it's a much more savoury way to meet people than MySpace. At least at Masturbate-a-thon you're a lot less likely to come in contact with perverts.

File Under:

• Television
• Idiocy