London - Men, pay attention. There are some things in life that should always remain a secret between yourself, your conscience and your shattered underpants. And the number of women you have slept with is right at the top of that banned list. Just zip it, please, in more ways than one.
The contents of your very own sex register should be a private matter. It should remain hush-hush.
If you are keeping a count - creepy enough in itself - then do the decent, gentlemanly thing and keep your totty tally to yourself. Public disclosure can only lead to humiliation and worse.
Look at the reaction to British actor Bill Roache’s dirty laundry confession this week that he has slept with 1,000 women.
First, there was a great, big, bubbly boil wash of general hilarity (not our kimono-wearing Ken!) followed by a disapproving cold rinse. Especially when the 79-year-old actor, who plays Ken Barlow in Coronation Street, admitted: “I didn’t have any control over my sex drive.”
Oh, poor Bill. Imagine having no power over your very own loins. It must be agony! It must make the average pet rabbit look, if not prim, then at least sexually temperate.
And it brings forth a nightmarish vision of Bill, his sandy fringe flopping in exertion as he careens across the Corrie cobbles with some crazed wild animal writhing around unbidden in his boxers. The wildebeest of lust, perhaps. That old Tasmanian devil called love.
Of course, what Bill is really saying is that he didn’t start the fire. It wasn’t his fault. He just couldn’t help himself!
During an interview for Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, to be broadcast on British television early in April, Bill also reveals that, despite his two wives, he had countless flings over the decades. Including one with actress Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner in the popular soap.
Phoenix died of lung cancer in 1986 after marrying long-term lover Tony Booth on her deathbed.
Yes, how lovely for her family to suddenly hear this unchivalrous revelation now. Especially after the actor - whose nickname was C*** Roache - revealed that it was just a one-night stand and that at the time, Phoenix “had a reputation”.
Roache now joins the inglorious list of champion boffers who have confessed in public to the number of women they have slept with. These are the men who have so many notches on their bedposts, they actually sleep in a nest of shredded toothpicks.
And despite their protestations of remorse and even shame, it is hard to see their greasy confessions as anything other than what they really are: big, fat boasts lurking under the cloak of remorse. Look at eerie Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, who happily admits to sleeping with a cast of “thousands”, once claiming to have bedded 265 women in a year. “Three or four a night sometimes,” he once said, as if the girls were glasses of water.
Tiger Woods puts a conservative 120 women on his birdie score sheet, while a biography of priapic Hollywood star Warren Beatty gives him a creepily precise tally of 12,775 women.
Ugh! This does not include “casual gropings”, which tells us all we need to know about Warren. None of it good.
Elsewhere, Mick Hucknall admitted to sleeping with thousands of women in a three-year period.
Fellow singer Julio Iglesias weighs in with an immodest “modest figure” of 3,000, while Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg lost any chance of ever being statesmanlike after admitting that he had slept with “no more than 30 women”.
The Cleggasmatron number is an irrelevance - it is the divulgence itself that is so wretched and so disappointing.
Couldn’t he just have said “no comment” and walked away from the problem? I’ve never been able to look at him in the same way since.
So, gentlemen, this is what I am saying. Just say no. To answering the question, that is. For to reply truthfully - or even untruthfully - is to shame yourself and do all the ladies in your life a terrible disservice. Even if, like Bill Roache and Mick Hucknall, your philandering is a now matter of deep regret.
Hucknall has expressed many feelings of remorse, saying that how he used to sleep with up to three women a day now makes him feel bad because he “hurt some really good girls”.
Really? I’m afraid that sounds rather more like the empty brag of someone who can’t pull the chicks any more, rather than a penitent uttering a deep pang of conscience.
At least Bill Roache sportingly revealed that some of the women did call him “Ken” during their most intimate moments. - Daily Mail