Soho Bites 52: Irina Palm (2007)

The film we're talking about in this episode is a relatively recent one by Soho Bites standards, and is only the second one we've talked about to be made in this millennium.

It's called Irina Palm from 2007 and stars that icon of 1960s counterculture, Marianne Faithfull.

She plays Maggie, a middle-aged woman whose grandson is terminally ill, and so she starts working in a Soho sex establishment to raise funds for his treatment.

Going by the alias of Irina Palm, she offers her many customers a very specific service.

The name Palm should give you a clue as to what that service is.

The film was very poorly received by UK critics, especially Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, who described it as, "A gobsmackingly awful British film.

Awful in that way that somehow only British films can be." Is it as bad as all that, though? Uh, maybe.

The film deals with some quite serious topics, a dying child, how a woman can find herself working in the sex trade out of financial desperation.

But does it address those subjects with the gravitas we might hope for? I'll be talking about Irina Palm in the second half of the show with my guest, the author Estella Tinknell, to see what her thoughts are on it.

Before that, though, in the first half of the show, I'll be talking to somebody who knows a bit more about the subject of sex work than the male director and writers of Irina Palm seemingly do, Laura Watson.

Laura is a spokesperson for the ECP, the English Collective of Prostitutes.

Founded in 1975, the ECP campaigns for sex workers' rights and safety, and for the kinds of financial conditions and resources that would enable women to leave prostitution if that's what they want to do.

They also campaign for the decriminalization of prostitution, which puts them at odds with some other women's rights campaigners, who argue in some cases for stricter laws surrounding the industry.

It's fair to say that the current legal situation in the UK is a complex mess, and although all these campaigners have the same core aim, to protect women working in the sex industry, opinions differ as to how this can be achieved.

To find out more about the ECP's position on this, its history and its campaigns, I took myself off to meet Laura in North London.