X-rated home videos from the age before selfies

A stranger in a cafe spills the beans about an embarrassing encounter with the past.

Everyone was doing it on camera

In a cafe recently, a woman sitting at the same table as me divulged in glorious detail a story of such delicious discomfort that I feel compelled to repeat it in full, and without the slightest pang of guilt.

I wasn’t eavesdropping — I was her audience. It was a communal table, after all.

In preparing for her daughter’s 21st birthday, this woman had dropped a handful of home movies into one of those places where they convert obsolete formats to DVD. The mid-1990s saw an explosion in home-movie making as, for the first time, people were able to create footage that didn’t need to be processed.

This woman’s firstborn was the subject of countless hours of footage. So much so that she was fretting about her other children: had their early lives been as thoroughly covered? Probably not.

At the DVD shop, which she reached via a dark flight of grimy stairs, she handed the movies to a bloke who agreed to charge $50 per disc, on to which he would cram as much footage as possible.

A week later she returned and collected four discs. Her living room TV had the only DVD player in the house, so on returning home she popped in the first disc and invited her second-born daughter to watch it. Within seconds she was on her feet.

The first scene featured a naked man, filmed by a static camera presumably perched on a tripod. She couldn’t shut down the player fast enough, fumbling for the controls as she manoeuvred herself between the screen and her 15-year-old, who was by this stage looking away uncomfortably.

It could happen to anyone, I was thinking. Those blokes at the store gave her the wrong tape.

But no, by this stage in the storytelling she was blushing a tiny bit. It was her own tape, made with her husband and, it would appear, among the pile she had handed to the store.

Of the four discs, she only noticed afterwards, the first had XXX written on the cover. The next three were crammed with images of the couple coochie-coochie-cooing over their girl.

The recoding guys had obviously seen some, if not all, of her explicit sex tape.

A sex tape? Now in her 50s, the woman just didn’t seem the type.

“Everybody was doing it!” she said.

Indeed, it seems that in the mid-90s, the first celebrity sex tape of its era became a cause celebre. Hands up who remembers Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s “private” but explicit tape reportedly being sold under the counter by video stores.

And if “everyone was doing it”, what fun!

At least it was at the time. Viewed some 20 years later, the woman in the cafe thought her pre-baby body was gorgeous but the horrible angles and harsh lighting resulted in a sequence to forget. The offending disc has now been destroyed, but its shadow lingers in the absence of disc one in a labelled series of four.

The mid-90s seems such a short while ago, and yet it predates the ubiquity of recorded images via smartphones, Instagram and other social media.

The teenage girl who almost witnessed the moment of her sister’s creation is coming of age in an era when she needs to be so much more careful.