BDSM RTV NEWS!!!!

18 november 2008

News Review interview: Georgina Baillie

Source: www.timesonline.co.uk Times Online - UK

The girl at the centre of the Russell Brand scandal reveals how her loving, middle-class upbringing gave way to drugs and porn


Imagine a typical middle-class family. Dad runs a building firm and does a spot of acting; mum is a voice-over artist. They have two children, Georgina and Billy. It’s a happy, secure setup with grandparents who live up the road in north London and provide heavenly Christ-mases with lots of presents. Grandad, as it happens, is quite well off, chiefly because he played the waiter Manuel in that peerless sitcom Fawlty Towers.

What child wouldn’t be proud to have Andrew Sachs as a grandfather? Georgina Baillie nods. “When I was about eight and I said, ‘My grandad is Manuel’, my friends were like, ‘Who’s Manuel?’ But when I got to secondary school it was a very cool thing.”

Did she ever watch Fawlty Towers with him? “Only about twice and only because we begged him to put it on.” He’d sometimes do Manuel impressions for her - but “only after hours of begging”. She giggles. “They were amazing grandparents and my brother and I were spoilt to death by them.”

There was one great occasion when Sachs was booked for an after-dinner turn as Manuel in a big Bath hotel. At Sachs’s insistence the grandchildren went along. “He was dressed as Manuel! It was awesome,” says Baillie.

Did she ever meet anyone else from the series? “I met John Cleese once at an anniversary party. His house was amazing, from what I remember.” Does she admire her grandfather? “Totally.” Does she love him? Are you kidding?

Not surprising, really, that Baillie had aspirations to act herself one day. At Queen’s Gate, her private day school in Kensington, west London, she appeared in all the plays, including As You Like It (she played Audrey). After her A-levels her grandad helped her to prepare audition pieces for drama school. Then her life suddenly started to unravel. She failed to get into drama school. Her parents split up. The family house was sold. And Baillie was lost.

She started lurching from one disastrous job to another. There was a bit of presenting on a TV rock show, a bit of work on a late-night X-rated TV channel, mouthing naughty suggestions to callers. Then she made adult films as a dominatrix who kicks men in the groin. Sweet little Georgina also took drugs and posed naked on the net.

Did her family approve? She looks at me as though I’m crazy. They were totally in the dark about her other life - until her occasional lover Russell Brand pitched her headlong into the media spotlight.

At first everyone took sides with the girl who was left exposed and humiliated when the comic - and his friend Jonathan Ross - left a filthy answerphone message for Sachs, claiming Brand had had sex with his granddaughter. And then broadcast it all on Radio 2. But sympathy for Baillie started to evaporate when it emerged that she was part of a “burlesque” dance troupe called the Satanic Sluts who wear knickers printed with 666 and throw around blood packs during their act.

When we meet she is wearing a red top that assists her body in living up to her stage name - Voluptua. Black-stockinged thighs bulge from beneath a tiny skirt, and her feet are crammed into teetering platforms. I also notice that Baillie, 23, has a perfectly oval face and the same colouring as Snow White.

“When I was 19 I thought that looks were all I had, really,” she tells me. “I didn’t have anything else. I didn’t have a degree. I wasn’t being supported [by my parents] any more. But I thought: I’m still good-looking so I guess I’ll make money that way.”

Not much, though. Snow White discovered that the rates for dressing up in rubber and posing for photographs while belting elderly men in the groin aren’t that great. That’s why the eight-hour shifts on BabeTalk TV, for which she had to talk dirty to callers, were quite welcome. “And I found it pretty easy.”

Doing her dominatrix shtick on film also helped to pay the rent. “The most I ever earned for a film was £500. I was there for two hours and all I had to do was walk around dressed as a soldier, kicking people.” What sort of people? “Oh, men aged from about 20 to 80.” Really? “Sometimes I felt bad because they were so old, but I suppose it’s good that men like that exist. Because then dominatrixes can be employed.”

Of course. Did you ever feel demeaned by this job? “Yes, but at least I could pay my bills.”

Then Baillie had a wake-up call. Walking through her two-bedroom flat (in which six people lived), she noticed the pole she used for pole-dancing had fallen down. The place was a tip, with drug paraphernalia everywhere. “I suddenly thought, oh my God, my life . . . I realised I wasn’t happy unless I was wasted. Any time I wasn’t wasted I was thinking about the next time I could be wasted.” It was around then that someone gave her Brand’s number.

“I’d just come out of two horrible relationships and my friend said, ‘Do you want this number? Because I can see you’re a bit frustrated.’ Russell and I were texting back and forth for a couple of weeks before we met up. I only saw him about four or five times. Ever.”

Baillie and I have met today at the headquarters of the horror film company that promotes the Satanic Sluts. It seems apt that it occupies a London town house in which William Hogarth, that great chronicler of urban morality, once had his studio. Indeed, the trajectory of Baillie - from doted-upon granddaughter to dominatrix who kicks naked men - could be seen as a morality tale. Or is it simply the story of what can happen to a teen-ager when Mum and Dad split up?

“So much changed,” Baillie recalls. “I was 19 and in America seeing relatives when my dad called me and said, ‘Your mother wants a divorce.’ I came home and all the furniture in the house had been moved. It put me on a downward spiral. The thing is that I had been so spoilt and sheltered.”

Her father went to the States and her mother bought a small flat. Suddenly, at 19, Baillie was on her own. “Most people don’t have a sudden cut-off from security,” she says. “Most people ease away gradually. I always thought I’d have a place to live in the family home.”
She still had her dreams, of course, and the inspirational grandfather. “I always wanted to be as talented as him. When I was trying to get into drama school he gave me some really helpful tips.” She pauses. “Unfortunately, I was so confident they’d accept me that I didn’t really listen.”

However, Sachs was there to help her in other ways. “I’ve been a pretty greedy grandchild,” Baillie acknowledges, admitting that he gave her the deposit for her rented flat. “I always felt that if things went up shit creek, I could call him.”

It’s very unfortunate that when things did indeed go up that particular river, Sachs’s name was involved.

The ensuing row has claimed several scalps: Brand resigned from his radio show; Lesley Douglas, controller of Radio 2, also resigned; Ross was suspended by the BBC for three months; and Baillie’s dominatrix past was no longer a secret.

Her first reaction, perhaps understandable after her financial struggles, was to sell her story to a tabloid newspaper and demand that Brand and Ross be sacked. Her second, two weeks later, was to say she didn’t think they should be sacked, after all: “I think possibly the BBC wasn’t quite the right place for Russell. But a lot of people were entertained by him on the BBC.” It’s not hard to deduce that she’s in a muddle.

“I saw my grandfather before all this came out,” she says. “He called me when he heard the voicemail [from Ross and Brand], and he said, ‘This is appalling. This is appalling.’ I thought: well, it’s already aired so there’s nothing more that either of us can do.” She was mistaken: a week or so later, when the Satanic Sluts arrived back from a dancing gig in Austria, she discovered her picture was in every newspaper. “I have no secrets,” she says sadly. “None. Everything I thought I’d take to the grave has become public knowledge.” Now everything’s out, how are things with Grandfather Sachs? “He hasn’t said anything to me.” Has she tried to get in touch? “I’m going to leave it for a while.”

How about writing? “I’ve thought about it but it’s really difficult to work out what to say. I’ll just have to see how it goes. I wrote my mother a note saying, ‘All these things about me are going to come out and I’m sorry.’ She says she loves me regardless. Apparently.” But, adds Baillie, who is staying with her mother at the moment, “she wasn’t there for me when I needed her. So that, along with everything else, contributed to me being a bit of a tearaway”.

On the positive side, of course, there’s been a lot of publicity for gothic burlesque. Baillie tosses back a strand of jet-black hair and nods: “I didn’t seek it but it’s been a good springboard. We’ve had loads of bookings; the rates have gone up.”

There are some who will think: well, she came from a good background; she should have been more circumspect about the company she kept and the work she accepted. But, as she admits, she has never had a game plan - apart from a vaguely felt ambition that she might quite like to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps. Late-night TV seemed a good start, even though the subject matter wasn’t ideal.

Perhaps her real problem is that adulthood came too fast. Her explicit pictures are certainly “adult” but she is never wholly convincing in them. For all Baillie’s professed appetite for erotic romping, I strongly sense that she’d prefer to return to a more innocent time and place. Hand in hand with her grandad.

“It’s unfortunate that [the relationship] doesn’t stay how it was when you were young,” she says, a wistful look on her ivory face. But grandparents get older, don’t they, I say. “Yeah, and so do we,” says Voluptua. “I’m not a kid any more.”