The film caused much controversy and misunderstanding, especially among middle-aged male critics - though there were many rave reviews from younger critics. Even the film's visuals split critical opinion, so that British style and music magazines praised its look to the skies, while the hostile conservative press condemned as cheap and terrible. Now you can decide for yourself because the film is available for secure oredering online at www.preachingtotheperv.com

This film is an ode to unusual love, the demands of unusual love and the right to express that love in public and in the bedroom (or dungeon as well, in this case ). It was inspired by the actual prosecutions of the fetish world that plagued the 1990s, and it is still illegal for a Brit couple to indulge in spanking at home if it results in welts or bruises (never mind that up until last year schoolboys or girls were still legally thrashed in private schools) .

Tanya Cheex, a performance artist/dominatrix, played by Guinevere Turner (co-writer and actress in American Psycho), comes to London with her shock show. A moral crusader in Parliament (Tom Bell) decides to shut her down with a private prosecution and sends in Peter (played by Christien Anholt) a handsome but virginal infiltrator to gather evidence of obscenity as an infiltrator. He wants to save her, she wants to pervert him. Who will win?

The narrative does not trade in realism, as you may gather. This a fairy tale with flagellation, a musical with eroticism and a pumping techno soundtrack.

The film's world is presented in a stylised way, fortified by irony and robust humour: sometimes black, sometimes bawdy. I have no idea what people will say but they won't have seen many films quite like this one. The audience will be engulfed by a heightened reality and concepts of surreal humour - the recumbent cat on Scotland Yard sign, the organ in the House of Commons chapel that segues into the sleazy electric organ on the soundtrack of the shocking bestiality video that Harding forces himself to watch.