Bright Club launches with Lust at the Wilmington Arms

Young Londoners with an appetite for lust got the chance to learn about the subject from every angle at an innovative new variety show this week. Hosted in the Wilmington Arms in Islington, 'Lust' was the first of a series of shows, named Bright Club, run by UCL's Public Engagement Unit in order to introduce the talent and ideas of the UCL community to a non-academic audience of 20-40 year olds. Comedian Richard Herring was compère at the event, providing appropriately smutty introductions to the UCL performers, who were drawn from across UCL's breadth of subjects. Mark Carnall of the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology, gave an eye-popping slide show on the colourful sexual habits of the animal kingdom, from mate-eating spiders to turtle-humping whales, while Cath Mercer, a statistician from UCL Epidemiology & Public Health, gave equally striking insights into the sexual habits of our very own species, drawing on edited highlights from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. Rosie Coates of UCL Chemistry revealed why lust is better with a chemist, with investigations into our favourite aphrodisiacs (hint: oysters aren't worth the money, the Spanish fly maintains an erection only at the cost of extreme pain or death - and just like Shakespeare warned, alcohol may provoke the desire, but the results aren't always quite so satisfactory). A literary perspective on lust followed an interval, with clips of early erotic films from film studies specialists Claire Thomson and Richard Farmer (UCL Scandinavian Studies) incorporating clips of a snowy-white ankle, a skirt blown up in an air vent (half a century before that Marilyn Monroe photograph) and a train disappearing into a tunnel in a riot of double entendre.