Red Shoe Diaries: rewatching a 90s’ ‘classic’

Red Shoe Diaries, along with the 10 Minute Freeview, was the porn of choice for many 11 year olds in the 90s. Of course, we loyal viewers now know what men and ladies really get up to when they love each other, but back then soft focus, saxophones and blue lights were all we really had to go on.

So is this fake humpathon worth a re-screening? Sky channel Real Lives seems to think so, as they keep showing episodes when we’re trying to do other things, like eat cereal.

Red Shoe Diaries is a show about a man who cares what women think. So it’s immediately wrong.

The first episode that popped onto our screen was You Have The Right To Remain Silent. The synopsis is roughly as follows:

‘A Policewoman fancies a guy she keeps seeing at the gym, but he ignores her (how dare he). To get round this problem, the policewoman decides to frame him for a crime, arrest him, then take him to an art gallery where she proceeds to wave her norks at him in a vaguely threatening manner.’

Let’s just pause for a minute here. Not to get all female on your ass, but can you imagine the reaction had this episode been the other way round? Let’s take a look at a male (and British, because why not) equivalent:

‘A policeman fancies some girl he keeps seeing at Bannatyne’s, so he frames her for a crime, arrests her, then takes her to Eureka when it’s shut, where he proceeds to slap her a bit with his whatsit.’*

*It should be noted here that any similarity to Duncan Bannatyne is purely coincidental.

This episode is possibly the weirdest piece of soft porn I’ve ever seen. And I’ve sat through a Mario Lopez erotic thriller.

The woman in this is played by real life woman Denise Crosby. She alo played Tasha Yar in Star Trek. Here she is…

We haven’t even got to David Duchovny yet. Calm your bits and pieces, he’s not in this one. Well he is, but not properly, so we’ll skip him and his bored mumbling for now.

Denise Crosby is in the gym, being a poor Vanilla Ice tribute act. She spends the first five minutes giving us a dispassionate list of bits of men’s bodies that she likes. These are:

FetlockBallsForeheadChinLower half of shinSolar plexusScalp

The poor man whose solar plexus she’s so obsessed with is played by Robert Knepper, who once appeared in The Next Generation with Crosby. Small world. He was going to marry Troi’s mother apparently.

There follows ten minutes from an episode of Police Interceptors.

She tells him to “spread ’em” so she can inspect his lower fetlock and bum. Then she takes him to an abandoned art gallery. Rather than, say, a Wetherspoons.

Standout quote so far: “And then there were the chairs…” She’s brought him here because she gets off on chairs. She’d go nuts if the DFS sale ever ended. This is also why she always had to stand up on the bridge in Star Trek.

We then get ten minutes of assorted bap flapping, while he looks disinterested. Not once has she explained to this poor man who she is and what the point of any of this is. God help him if he’s left a casserole in the oven at home.

She also really loves condom shopping. So much so that she tells us about all the different pharmacists she visited and the awkward conversations she had about what colour would be the most appropriate. Van Dyke Brown? Cadmium Blue? Liquid Clear? I only know colours from painting shows, so I’m assuming it was one of those.

His comeback? He finds all sorts of people sexy, including his bank manager and his own aunt. This is meant to be erotic, but has all the passion of two strangers talking in a warehouse about chairs. Wait…

After they get bored with this, it’s the standard fake humping fare, although this episode is one of the best, because we discover that Denise Crosby gets off on shouting “BULLSHIT!” at random intervals (all the time). We sit through approximately six minutes of her shouting “BULLSHIT!” while he feebly mounts her, all the time wishing we were watching Celebrity Squares instead.

The story ends with them playing squash a month later. She’s still shouting “BULLSHIT!” while he screams at her that he’s going to take her to dinner and meet her grandmother, out of spite. This, sadly, did not get an episode.

So that happened. Let’s move on to the next episode. Because that one’s got a whole lot more David Duchovny.

Never let it be said that we here at Den Of Geek don’t listen to our readers. In the imaginary conversation I just had in my head, you all said you really wanted to see this one. If you were a boy in the 90s and wanted to see sci-fi people with their bristols out, this probably wasn’t what you had in mind.

I swear the theme tune is the same music they have on Daily Politics.

We begin with what look like screenshots from The X-Files. This is crap. One minute in and they’re not doing any sex yet.

Jake meets some woman in that most American of all institutions – a diner. She recognises him from Red Shoe Diaries, the SHOW SHE’S CURRENTLY IN. What. I’ve missed something. That’ll teach me to sit here playing Freecell when I’m supposed to be watching this.

The woman is all seductive. She threatens to drink Jake under the table and quote some football stats at him. I’ve tried this with vodka and darts. It doesn’t work. But whatever. Jake now has a date in a caravan. With two other people.

Jake looks uncomfortable, like he’d really rather be at home watching Antiques Roadshow. Jake’s date, Jo, has brought him along to watch her shooting a porno. Ironically, it looks like she’s doing shots for the 10 Minute Freeview. We should review that in another article.

They go back to his place/her place/a place, where Jo beats up a burglar. Jake runs along behind her shouting “let it go!” like crappy foreshadowing of Frozen. The burglar shoots them, but somehow misses, and they find this hilarious and sexy. Cue some very angry sex indeed. I think their safe word is “I didn’t use a coaster.”

The next morning, Jake discovers Jo’s photo album, full of long distance shots of…

Go on, guess…

…Nelson Mandela! Just kidding. Jake.

This, in an ass kicking of all reason, doesn’t put Jake off, but makes him want to go out with her, and be Mr Jo. They live happily ever after, until Jo introduces Jake to her husband. Her… wait, what? Great. I can’t even understand the plot of Red Shoe Diaries. I am a bucket full of failure and wrong.

Jo says to Jake: “I lost myself in you.” I like to think she added off camera: “and my watch. If you find it can I have it back please.”

The moral of this story ladies? If you like a guy, there’s really no harm in taking secret photos of him or kidnapping him. It’s cheaper than taking him to Wetherspoons and buying a new bra.

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