Before we begin a warning, today's episode contains discussions of a sexual nature.

In a world obsessed with fame, it was a seminal moment, a scandal that allowed people who in

the past had worshipped celebrities to now feel like they own them.

We now do assume that if there is celebrity, we're allowed access to whatever part of their

lives we want to know about. It was the first of what became a hackneyed trope,

the leaked celebrity sex tape. It was also the moment that launched the internet as a marketplace

where everything was for sale. Today, when you look at the comparisons between things that

happened with other celebrities, perhaps having pictures of themselves naked stolen from their

eye cloud and things like that, we call that revenge porn now.

You're listening to stories of our times from the times and the Sunday times. I'm Manvine Rana.

Today, Pam and Tommy are the scandal that changed celebrity culture.

A new drama series that documents the theft and publication of the world's most famous sex tape

has brought the incident back into the news. Pam and Tommy, on Disney Plus, has taken viewers

back to the 90s where this tale begins. So, we're going to go back to the end of 1995, December

1995. Taking us on this journey down memory lane is Jane Malkerrens, associate editor at the Times

magazine. We should start in London, probably, things that's where we are today, and Pamela Anderson,

who was the star of Baywatch, a much loved, slightly soapy drama about a bunch of lifeguards

in Los Angeles. She was in London with her reasonably new husband who should be married to for nine

months, who was the drama in Motley Crew. But while they were here on this particular chip to London,

they discovered that a tape of them, a 54-minute tape of them, was for sale in Los Angeles,

and eight minutes of those 54 minutes were quite intimate. Ah, that's a very polite way of putting

it. And Jane, there is now a series, Disney Plus has turned that moment, the moment of this tape

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