Secrets of Playboy, review: a disheartening trawl through Hefner's mucky mansion

Be honest, who could possibly have guessed that there might be something a teensy bit dodgy about Playboy? An organisation which made women dress up in bunny suits and rollerskate around tennis courts while a crinkly man in a dressing gown sat leering over them, smoking a pipe.

In that sense, Secrets of Playboy (Channel 4), a workaday trawl through the history of Hugh Hefner and his noxious fantasy world, worked best as a repeated jab in the ribs: every bit of archive footage from the mansion basically asked "How was this ever okay?" It’s shocking, really, that it takes a distance of decades for the culture to conclude that what was sold as some kind of aspirational Xanadu was just another example of women being systematically demeaned for the benefit of men.

The best thing about Secrets of Playboy was how little credence it gave to Hefner’s toxic self-justification; to the idea that "Hef" was on a First Amendment crusade, stoked by a strict Methodist upbringing to cast off the social and sexual shackles of postwar America; to the idea that he was some sort of free speech buccaneer rather than a whiffy old perv; to the idea that Playboy magazine sold millions of copies because men just loved drooling over those big, bouncing articles.

Instead, episode one made plain that – as we’ve seen so often in recent years – the great believer in individual freedom was himself a control freak, covering his weird magic castle with cameras and microphones so that he could amass compromising material to use against people in power when he was threatened.

Whether or not any of this is a "secret" in 2022 is the one thing that nags. Episode one focussed mainly on Jennifer Saginor, who grew up living in the Playboy mansion (read that back) and was, inevitably, shredded as a functional human being as a result. Her testimony is shocking, but her book came out in 2007. So the only revelatory fact on show in Secrets of Playboy was the extent to which Hefner used his contacts to try and stop her mentioning in the book that she’d had an underaged affair on his property.

By the time this comes out, towards the end of the episode, very little would surprise you about the Hef, even that he ate only M&Ms and consumed 35 cans of Pepsi a day (why narcissist megalomaniacs drink so much cola is a question surely deserving of its own podcast). In many ways, it’s the lack of surprises in Secrets of Playboy that are so depressing: the question of how this was not merely allowed but actively lionised for so long sticks in the craw throughout.