6 September 2009
Hold the front page: A few weeks ago two British nationals –one youngish male and one older female- were caught secretly filming inside a popular den of the chrome pole. When the eagle-eyed foreign manager spotted their surreptitious activities he immediately confronted the sheepish pair, demanding they surrender their ultra-modern version of the Box Brownie. Naturally, they were unwilling to do so. According to the manager, a standoff ensued in which the pair claimed they were freelance journalists employed to search for a Thai bargirl whose British boyfriend had died leaving her a sum of money. When the manager told them he would get the local plod they relented and handed over their camera, leaving the bar in high dudgeon.
The pair returned a little while later with Howard Miller, the leader of the Foreign Tourist Police Volunteer Assistants, and a fellow Englishman, in tow. He asked the manager what had transpired. Sensibly, Howard asked to look at the film and after seeing that footage simply showed girls engaged in the sorts of activities associated with places where UV lighting and chrome poles are the staple, he sided with the bar manager and told the shutterbugs they could come and collect their valuable equipment the next day, after the bar manager and owners had erased the tape. The manager told me the pair had been secretly filming in at least two other dens of the chrome pole. The pair collected their camera the next day.
The bar manager told me the local peelers weren’t all that interested in the incident, one officer claiming any footage these people might have obtained couldn’t be used without Thai government permission on British television anyway. Obviously an officer whose knowledge of foreign media doesn’t stretch beyond cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam, with subtitles.
The obvious question is, if the pair was indeed looking for a particular lady, why didn’t they approach the police volunteer assistants and ask for help? The answer, of course, is there is no bargirl with a Cinderella fortune awaiting collection. What this pair was about was simply trying to get as much sleazy footage as they could, put together an expose of the Pattaya bar scene, and probably hope to sell it to some British independent TV channel.
The two ‘undercover’ journos managed to get off lightly. Had they tried the same trick in a genuine bonded brothel in the Thai-Burmese border areas (or anywhere else for that matter) I doubt they would simply have had their camera confiscated for a period of time. There might well be a missing persons report out for them. Of course, they wouldn’t bother doing a story like that because it doesn’t involve Western males, especially those with accents originating within the Sceptred Isle and, inter alia, their perceived audience aren’t interested in the sordid fate that awaits a bunch of slant-eyed Asians.