I HAD a night in on my own and it was too hot to do much except collapse in front of the telly with a couple of cold beers.

A film - or as we're now obliged to say, a "movie" - was what I was looking for. We can get more than 600 channels on our set. I'm not boasting. Here in the City of London among the tall buildings, cable or satellite is the only way you can receive a picture at all. I made the remote control work overtime as I browsed to discover what films were showing that night.

There were plenty about nerdy American teenagers obsessed with sex. There were some sadistic horror films. There was the usual crop of sentimental human interest films all with a cringe factor off the top of the Richter scale. But mainly the films available featured too much explicit sex for a man of my nervous disposition.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against sex, but I am revolted by the way it's usually portrayed on the screen. There's far too much embarrassing huffing and puffing and slurping and gasping. And we get so much nudity these days that naked flesh has all but lost its ability to arouse any interest. Seen one, seen them all.

How differently these things were done in the days when chaps of my age were lads about town. In the backstreets of Leeds in the 1950s we used to go in a gang to any one of half a dozen local cinemas - or "picture houses" as they were called. Sometimes they were given uncomplimentary but entirely appropriate names such as "the flea pit" or "the bug hutch". We lusty, but repressed, lads went to see the sex-bombs of the age: Diana Dors, Jane Russell, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor and the vamp to out-vamp them all, Marilyn Monroe.

And what did we get for our money? No nudity. No screen lovers rolling around gasping with tumescent passion. We got a bit of cleavage and some very prominent sweaters. And whenever a sex scene took place, the picture changed to the tide rolling up the shore and back again. But it was all sexier than the hideously explicit images of today. Lana Turner in that incredibly pointed bra was enough to arouse us to such guffaws and wolf-whistles that we had to be shushed by the chucker-out, who would shine his torch on us and make threats.

In 1958 there was a new craze: the nudist films. These were a sensation to the buttoned-up burghers of Armley, Leeds and for a while the cinemas were packed. There was one such film, The Garden of Eden, in which nothing happened for three-quarters of an hour while two voluptuous 30-something ladies made plans for their first nudist holiday. The suspense was soporific. Then one of the ladies actually took off her bra and a whoop went up around the cinema as if they were showing Leeds United winning the Cup Final. Once the ladies had got to the beach, you didn't see anything else except private parts painstakingly concealed behind beach balls and newspapers. Everybody got the giggles. Sex on the screen wasn't lurid in those days: it was hilarious.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange