Playboys. Remember them? When I was growing up, playboys were glamorous figures. You could never hope to meet them, but you knew everything about them – or thought you did – because their pictures were in the papers and the glossy magazines, and on Pathe News in the cinema, every day of the week.
The thing about playboys was, of course, that they weren’t boys. They may have started out young, but, having served their apprenticeships, they only really came into their own at the age of 40, carrying on until they died of pleasure, or flatulence, at some point in their eighties.
Generations of journalists and paparazzi made handsome livings recording the goings-on of this exotic breed, who hardly ever stepped out in public without dark glasses and a twenty-year-old beauty on their arm, the latter sporting full lips, “pouting” breasts and teeth that looked as if they might glow in the dark.
