Queer As 18th Century Folk (C4); Bad Girls (ITV1)

IN an upstairs room at a Molly house, a man in women's clothing was pretending to give birth, assisted by a second man in midwife's garb. After much pushing, shoving and screaming, the baby was delivered - usually a wooden doll, sometimes a pair of bellows, or even a Cheshire cheese.

These were strange times, as this Georgian Underworld documentary showed, when politicians could be screaming queens and Queen Anne was widely rumoured to be a closet case herself.

Mother Clap was "a foul-mouthed, Barbara Windsor figure" who ran one of the best gay bars in 18th century London and the earliest example of a fag hag.

Molly houses were places where men were christened with female names as a glass of gin was thrown into their face (waste of alcohol, if you ask me). Customers, mostly working class and respectable, were called Mollys. Going to one of these establishments was preferable to picking up men in theatres and pissing alleys. As the narrator so eloquently put it: "Some men wanted more than a bit of discreet sodomy on the side".

Mother Clap became the social scapegoat as the Society for the Reformation of Manners set out to stop sleaze on the streets. Two gay constables infiltrated the Molly houses and Mother Clap was put in the pillory, where she was pelted with excrement and dead cats.

Toffs could get up to all sorts of naughtiness in the privacy of their own stately homes. John, Lord Harvey, was married with eight children, a mistress and a male lover. Surprisingly, he found time to be the 18th century equivalent of a spin doctor to Prime Minister Walpole.

His downfall was falling in love with a country lad. Harvey dumped his wife and children to set up home with him. His enemies used his sexuality to cause his downfall, and it was 250 years before Britain would see an openly gay politician again.

Because men couldn't conceive of sex between women, female homosexuality was not technically illegal. But even royals were at it. Queen Anne had the hots for Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and, aptly enough, Lady of her Bedchamber.

What women were did with and to each other was revealed by the discovery in the 1980s, behind the bookcase in a Yorkshire house, of the sexually explicit diaries of Ann Lister. She referred to herself as a masculine oddity ("today we might prefer rampaging bulldyke" said the oh-so-sensitive narrator) who voted Tory when not putting her hands up the petticoats of women in the neighbourhood.

Eventually, she set up house with a neighbouring heiress, all the while detailing her bedroom habits in diaries which delved into areas her contemporary, Jane Austen, never visited.

All this 18th century sex leaves no room to detail what the Bad Girls of HM Prison Larkhall have been up to. I fear their antics look tame compared to their Georgian counterparts.

Published: 09/05/2003