They’re naked and they dance—is a fair description of Get ‘Em Off a documentary that celebrates 100 years of striptease. How or why it’s 100 years of striptease is never quite fully explained, though there are references in the commentary to ancient Egyptian strippers, Parisian can-can dancers, the night they raided Minsky’s and some risque music hall acts form the early 1900s.

Made in 1976, the summer of the great heatwave that swept across Britain bringing drought, hosepipe bans and melting roads, Get ‘Em Off captures the slowly fading sleazy world of London’s strip clubs. Filmed mainly at Soho’s Nell Gwynne Club, the documentary strikes an awkward balance between laddish banter and documenting the performances by the strippers: Miss Anne, Miss Alby, Miss Chastity, Miss Cher, Miss Carmen, Miss Anna, Miss Linda, Miss Coursetta. we see these girls perform their routines in front of tinsel, drapes, under Kenneth Anger-style lighting.

“Strippers,” we are told, “have their own language.”

There’s a movement called ‘The Coffee Grinder’. You write the letter O with your axel, know what I mean?, whilst in the bump the hips spring forward, sometimes called bump and grind. There’s the ‘The Trailer’ which is the strut before the strip, that’s what we’ve been looking at up to now; we’ve seen three examples of it; then there’s the quiver and the shimmer and the we’re going to see the lot.

Many of these strip clubs became the venues for punks and New Romantics, starting a whole new world of club culture during the 1980s and early 1990s.
 

 
The commentary is performed by actor Kenneth Macleod and presenter Hugh Scully, best known for his work with the BBC on Nationwide and the Antiques Road Show. The inclusion of these two rather straight, respectable individuals (a bit like having the Muppets’ Statler and Waldorf in attendance) gives the film a nod of establishment approval. The pair continue:

They don’t believe in giving it to them all at once or too quickly; Strippers have motto’s like:
‘Make ‘em wait and
‘Don’t be too eager’
‘Give Hell’
‘Make them go dry at the mouth’
‘Freeze to marble in their seats’
‘Give them a create of blink in case they miss something’
‘Make them beg with their eyes and howl like wolves under a full moon’
After all, they have come here to have a good time. The tease is the thing; Men in a hurry shouldn’t go to strip clubs. For every customer who loses his cool and shouts ‘Get It Off!’ the stripper is ready with the answer “Can’t You See Anything Yet?’

What they do see is refreshingly absent of silicon, Botox, and vajazzle.
 

 
The full NSFW documentary ‘Get ‘Em Off,’ after the jump…