The Fantasy Club
11 Hadden Street
ABERDEEN
AB11 6NU
Thursday 16th December 1999, 11:05pm, C4
It strikes me that I must have been at the Fantasy Club in Aberdeen during the period when they were filming this documentary, given the Christmas footage. However, I would just like to stress I was most emphatically not the guy paying £30 to get one of the girls to jump up and down on his balls. This was one of the memorable moments from a very interesting film about a year in the live of six dancers in the place, who shared a house as well as employment.
You could hardly have picked a more disparate group of characters: Sally, the Princess Di-alike saving for breast implants, Rachel the depressed, Haley the borderline psychopath, Natasha the chirpy Geordie. Their personalities weren't always initially apparent: Dee, who came over to start with as a foul-mouthed bitch, eventually developed into perhaps the nicest of the girls, well-adjusted and compassionate. This was perfect soap-opera stuff: emotions running high, and an almost continual stream of trauma and drama, admittedly inevitable when you condense a year into under an hour. Plots like the presence of a thief in the house (Dee's bad first impression was down to her having had £150 nicked), gradually developed and unfolded, with a great denouement as security cameras at the club apparently showed Natasha going through the lockers. She was run out of town, but the thefts continued... Oops!
There were some insights into the management: Ronnie, the owner of both the club and the house, seemed almost like a father figure, cooking his "charges" Christmas dinner, but being stern when one's drinking became a problem [chalk up another ongoing drama!] However, he was about the only man who appeared, though their presence was sometimes to be seen lurking in the background, in one form or another. Nor did you get much of a feel for the city, beyond shots of seagulls picking at chip-wrappers; I went to university there, and there's no doubt the place does have a personality, which impacts on almost every activity there. This film concentrated on the girls to an almost claustrophobic degree, and it's perhaps no surprise that at the end of the year, only one of the original occupants was still there. [Hell, the prospect of living with my work-colleagues fills me with horror!]
Some of the dancers did come across as being hugely money-oriented -- any of their customers who were watching can be excused feeling somewhat manipulated, and I'd quite like to be a fly on the wall at the place tonight! However, a lot of credit goes to the film-makers for doing a pretty good job of getting under their subjects' skin, even if the cash-grabbing stripper routine is a bit of an easy mark, bordering on cliche. Perhaps there's another documentary (as well as the soap-opera!) to come out, as it would also have been interesting to hear what the punters had to say about it all. Especially the dude who got his balls trampled...
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