OK, what’s going on? A respectable TV website is featuring filth! What place does Deep Throat have here? Well, quite a lot as it happens. Of course, I’m not looking at the film per se, but the interesting documentary about the skin flick that propelled Linda Lovelace to overnight superstardom, Inside Deep Throat (More4, Wednesday, 9pm).

Deep Throat was shot for a paltry $25,000 in ’72 by a hairdresser called Gerard Damiano. After the furore and scandal that surrounded the film had died down, Deep Throat turned over an impressive $600-million and become a cinematic phenomenon that brought pornography to mainstream America.

The documentary, narrated by the ace Dennis Hopper looks at the making of the notoriously amateur (hardcore) comedy, its cult appeal through its B-Movie quality, the rise and inevitable fall of star Linda Lovelace and of course, the omnipotent moral backbone of America backlashing their way to red faced fury. All these elements are sewn loosely together to make an admittedly unfocused doc’, but a thoroughly fascinating one nonetheless. It’s an attempt to put the landmark porn movie in historical context and to fight it’s corner in the argument that it virtually contributed to a sexual revolution in cinema, and quite possibly in society too. With this, you get all the nit and grit of the facts surrounding the film. Box office figures, how they found the actresses, but also, and more interesting (and depressing), claims that the late Lovelace sex scenes were in fact rape, and co-star Harry Reems’s shocking prosecution and director Damiano hinting at mafia involvement. It’s sobering, intriguing and one for fans of landmark pop culture. [Mof Gimmers]