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I am standing in the center of London's Millennium Bridge, on a blisteringly cold Tuesday morning in April, with St. Paul's Cathedral looming behind me and a veritable flotilla of noisy tugboats tooting below. Overhead, a bevy of jets continues to whoosh by, whipping up the wind; and with no overcoat to protect me, I have begun to freeze. Hundreds of mid-morning commuters rush past in both directions, wondering why I remain so absolutely still in the center of the bridge, sporting merely a thin cashmere jacket, with makeup smeared all over my face. I have now stood here, virtually motionless, for approximately two hours, and I seem to have very little sensation remaining in any of my extremities.
With a group of colleagues from the independent television production company Tiger Aspect Productions, I have begun filming a one-hour science documentary, Britain's Sexual Fantasies, for the British terrestrial broadcaster Channel Five, based on my three-year research project on the psychology of sexual fantasies. With the assistance of the pollsters YouGov, I have now assembled a database of more than 18,000 British sexual fantasies, probably the largest collection of such material in the world. Dan Chambers, the Director of Programmes at Five, and Justine Kershaw, the Commissioning Editor for Science, had engaged me to write and present this one-hour film back in 2003, and it has taken rather a long time for us to complete the background research before the cameras could roll.
I have microphone wires concealed beneath my shirt, and a battery-operated microphone pack in my back trouser pocket.