Samia Ghadie, Mylene Klass, Tina O'Brien and Nell McAnderw present: A Lad's Mag Special*

I spent over an hour and a half scanning Lad’s Mags, I feel strangely emotionally exhausted

I’m having a massive sort out this month and part of that involves a project I’ve been meaning to do for a good while: I have piles of magazines around my house, all of which only contain one article I’m keeping it for, seriously I could suffocate you under a pile of old Mojo, Uncut and Hammer magazines that are being kept just for a top 10 singles article, and I’ve been meaning to scan in those one articles so I can have more room AND check what the top 15 Pub Rock albums of all time are. The first to be scanned are one of my small piles of Lad’s Mags (I’m short on time today), I was hoping this was all of them but there’s another pile lurking in the loft somewhere filled mostly with Abi Titmuss issues of Nuts. The Lad’s Mags are dying off, FHM (the king of them all) ended a little while ago and I’ll admit I felt a twinge of sadness when I heard this, for my generation of boys these magazines were a key part of our adolescence, most didn’t have actual nudity (some did) so newsagents gave far less of a fuck about selling them to obviously underage patrons and this was as close to porno a lot of kids my age could get in a time when the internet was in it’s infancy, Dial-Up was the only option and a fraction of households had even that (we didn’t have the internet until I was about 14). What the lad’s mags lacked in nudity they made up for by having raunchy photoshoots from recognisable quote-unquote famous women. But let’s be clear, these magazines were shit, they’d have one article about one television presenter you fancied and then pages and pages of wank (a fitting term) with the worst priorities and outlook on life possible without being a BNP newsletter.

I actually have a weird emotional attachment to these magazines so they’re not going to be thrown away, I was just scanning them so I can put them in a dark, largely inaccessible corner of my room where I don’t want to put books I might actually read once every two years.  Anyway I scanned these six articles for my own benefit, but I thought I might as well share them just in case anyone else cares about old photos of British TV stars so I’m not going to write a great deal in the rest of this article. I also understand his is the least PC thing I will ever post (well until I find those Abbi Titmuss issues of Nuts), click an image to enlarge it. 

Mean Streets

Tina O’Brien, Samia Ghadie and Nikki Sanderson in Maxim, issue 112, August 2004

For the Imaginary Americans: These were the three young sexy girls on Coronation Street, which is pretty much the premiere soap opera in the UK, O’Brien and Sanderson had come into the show as jailbait (as Sarah-Louise Platt and her best friend Candice respectively) but I think Samia Ghadie (Maria) was always an adult, regardless this was the first time all three of them did a photo shoot together and my god you couldn’t have sold this to me quicker, I was in lust with all three of these girls at the time (my family watched and still watch ‘Corrie’ religiously) and I think if Sarah-Louise and Candice had kissed as some sort of experimenting story-line (not an unlikely situation with this show) at least five parts of my body would have detonated in joy. Having all three of them in bikinis was the next best thing but honestly I’m not that mad on the interior shots, I think it’s the unnecessary costume jewellery, I’d’ve much preferred them to have kept the black outfits from the cover. Sanderson gets the biggest focus because this was her first shoot, I thought this was Tina O’Brien’s too but given how her solo shot isn’t a full page spread I’m guessing it wasn’t, or the FHM crew fancied Sanderson more (you know I’m going to look this up online after I’ve finished typing this right?) but even though Ghadie is the most adorable and Sanderson is the sexiest your eye is just drawn to O’Brien in every group shot, something about that girl, she has presence. Ghadie and O’Brien are still on the show btw, and haven’t aged a day, Sanderson left and went to another soap called Holyoakes and turned into someone’s slutty aunt but then everyone on that show either looks like someone’s slutty aunt or slutty sister, yes even the men.

Alone At Last…

Myleene Klass in FHM, issue 159, August 2003

I don’t think I can accurately express my affection for Myleene Klass on the internet, it would just lead to me being tracked down and arrested within 24 hours, almost certainly with aid from Tumblr. I just think she is one of the most physically attractive people alive, she has the most amazing face, it manages to actually be pretty, sexy and cute at the same time – the fuck do you do that? Klass is still strangely relevant today on the back of appearing on a reality show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and being on a series of adverts for a department store - so she’s no one important and was only marginally important back when this came out; she was one of Hear’say, a band formed on a reality TV show Pop Stars (the first of its kind really), the band were rubbish (though I can still sing ‘Pure And Simple’) but all three women in it were gorgeous so you bet I watched it every night (I was about 14) and it was lust at first sight with Myleene Klass, I had a bit of a thing for Suzanne too (who got drunk and flashed a lot and photos of this got published in The Sun, always a class periodical, I think I still have scans of them somewhere, because I’m classy too) but Myleene was just it, and she still is, even after that thing with her boyfriend dealing drugs (she’s left him now I think). Funnily enough one of Hear’say (Kim Marsh) is currently on Coronation Street and has been for some time, I don’t know what happened to Suzanne but she went to my senior school, so I suspect council estate and benefit fraud.

ALSO, when I opened this magazine, this fell out:

Me and my friend/were both kinda obsessed with Thora Birch – the daughter from American Beauty - when we were at school and we both had this picture printed out and stuck on our walls, I had completely forgotten that.

Hannah’s All Grown Up!

Rebecca Ritters in Ice, issue 12, September 2002    

When I was a kid my mother and grandmother (who I lived with) seemed to watch every soap opera on television – except Emmerdale because fuck farmers – they watched Flying Doctors, that is how low their standards for soap operas were so long as it didn’t involve anyone called Dingle. Now they only watch Coronation Street, which is a shame because I wanna know what’s going on in Eastenders goddammit, Peggy died and Grant came back and they didn’t watch it? The Mitchel Brothers = ratings, why are they the only people who can’t they see this? And there’s no way I’m going to watch it of my own accord, my ego couldn’t handle it (I kid, I have no ego, it was destroyed long ago). So they used to watch Neighbours and Home and Away and as I hope you know Australian Soap Operas (even Flying Doctors) are gold, they are shit in all the right ways and of course everyone knows that male, female, straight, gay, bi, personal pronoun, Australia is filled with whatever you find sexually attractive in great quantities. I still take great please in watching both these shows when I can, but I used to see them every day I wasn’t at school – all through the holidays, whenever I was off ill, lunchtime was Aussie Soap time and here’s how I remember Hannah, played by Rebecca Ritters:

Even though she as roughly my age at the time she sadly couldn’t compete with older girls like Shannon - who was stunning in every way - or Sally - who was adorable and also had massive boobs - but Hannah was just unforgettable, I don’t know if I mean that in a good or bad way. So when I saw this in 7-11 I was amazed but frustrated: I couldn’t buy it because Ice - which is one of the most irrelevant Lad’s Mag in the history of Lad’s Mags (and they’re pretty fucking irrelevant overall) - was one of the men’s magazines that had an X-rated section (that you had to tear open) that contained actual porn and the people in 7-11 knew me and there was no way they’d’ve ever have sold me it. Luckily I was able to buy it at a service station (undoubtedly Fleet Services) while on a long journey, I had to hide this act from my mum and hide the magazine the whole holiday but it was so worth it, Hannah from Neighbours turned into a sexy adult and was dressed as a school girl and I was sixteen, I would have eaten live mice every day of the vacation if it meant I could look at this on a regular basis.

  

Queen B

Mel B in Loaded, issue 78, 2000

This was the first Lad’s Mag I ever bought, which shows you how old I looked at 14 and how old I look now. I was mega into the Spice Girls during their heyday, it’s an old shame of mine. I was mostly into Geri Halliwell (another old shame), it’s only as I grew older I realised that Emma Bunton and Mel B were the real stars and wearing a union jack dress once cannot trump having awesome hair permanently.  Honestly the article itself isn’t really that good on the picture front but (weirdly for these magazines) the article is where the goodness is at, the Spice Girls were all common as muck and Mel B is perhaps the bluntest and crassest of the lot so this is just filed with glorious, tactless filth. Anyway really it was all about the cover. This cover was reported on in the daily newspapers (although my family have bought The Sun since before I was born, and The Sun is only a newspaper technically), there was a making of feature – I dunno if it was in this issue or another or something else, probably The Sport - but a Spice Girl with CGI bees on her bare baps was very high profile is my point.

Rule Britannia!

Nell McAndrew, Samia Ghadie and Myleene Klass in FHM, issue 165, September 2003

THE MOTHERLOAD! It’s been 13 years and this would still be THE MOTHERLOAD for me, it’s also a good indicator of the sort of outlook these magazines had, this article is their ‘best of British’ special feature where they chose the ‘best’ from British TV presenters, Pop Stars, actresses and whatever the fuck Nell McAndrew was doing at the time, oh she was a model, and by best I mean ‘most shaggable’, they really did write the entire magazine with their dicks, even the gadgets pages. Nell McAndrew is now a fitness instructor and has somehow managed to become even more attractive to me, she still has her amazing face that somehow makes her look like a living cartoon mascot but now it’s on the most toned body possible and it’s her job to wear very little (so not much different from being a model, really):

I bothered to track down a hi-res version of that cover, Fabulous is the magazine given away in The Sun newspaper, which makes it so worthless it’s not even used to wrap fish ‘n chips with, hell it’s too shiny for toilet paper so it really is functionally pointless but if it has Nell McAndrew in tiny shorts it is suddenly of utmost importance. I’m not a ‘no fat chicks’ sort of dickhead btw, I just find people who have a something notable about them the most attractive, which includes scars, tattoos and mad hair, and being that toned is certainly notable. On another note, do you think Samia Ghadie looks scarily like Miley Cyrus (pre-madness)? I really, really think this and it used to bug me because at a glance I couldn’t tell if it was Samia Ghadie and I cared or if it was Miley Cyrus and didn’t really give a shit. it’s nice that Cyrus now looks like a anime character designed by a gangbanger, I can finally tell her apart from a British Soap Opera actress I have crushed on since at least 2003 – that’s totally worth torpedoing your career and becoming a punchline for right?

There you go, I am aware this is the worst thing I have posted, I haven’t bought a Lad’s Mag in a good half a decade at the very least but I like to share whatever I scan when I can, even if is about as PC as an episode of The Comedians, speaking of which, I DO still have those scans of Suzanne from Hear’say: