They say ‘A Golden Age’ is a time when things work in such a way as to make you believe they will work that way forever. It was like that with the British magazine FHM. Beforehand, it had been unimaginable. Afterwards, it seemed inconceivable. But, while it was going on, well, it just seemed to be the way of the world for all of us involved in the magazine.
People who worked on FHM at the time look back on its end-of-the-century heyday with sheepish amazement. It had been bought by EMAP, the legendary magazine publisher from a company called Tayvale in 1994 for £1mn; within a few years it was making that much in profit every month.
“It was,” recalls one FHM-er “the best deal since the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians.” This is the kind of gag which would have made a perfectly serviceable headline in FHM, containing characteristic notes of worldliness and wiseacre humour; it’s now a thought which would only be permitted within the walls of closed WhatsApp groups.
Like a handful of other EMAP magazines – such as Smash Hits, More! and Heat – FHM rose on the back of gleefully populist editing, artful packaging and an accompanying feeling that the world was changing; it flamed out at the peak of its arc, the victim of formula fatigue and the free availability of that for which it had formerly been able to charge money.
Although the magazine was edited with the hope that it would be “funny, sexy and useful”, nobody working on it would have made the mistake of underestimating the pre-eminence of that middle category. At the time, hundreds of thousands of young people relied for regular bursts of excitement on the arrival at the news stand of the latest issue of FHM and a few other magazines. Competitors including IPC’s Loaded liked to do ‘concept covers’. With FHM, the concept was always a famous young woman who was – in the word hardly anyone used at the time – hot. In those last days of magazines as physical objects, glimpsing a new edition for the first time was a thrilling moment. At least 50% of the editor-in-chief’s time would be spent securing the right glamorous young female for the cover. The PRs were so sold on the power of an FHM cover as the key element of a media strategy that there were even editions promising “Catatonia’s Cerys as you’ve never seen her before” and “Mariella Frostrup talking dirty”.
FHM didn’t fall on its formula straightway.
In the early days of EMAP’s ownership, its cover stars were the likes of Brit comics Vic Reeves and Harry Enfield and there was much talk about how the readers might ‘Be A Man’. That began to change in 1995 with Dani Behr, the first outrider of what would prove to be a leggy battalion of small screen stars the warring TV companies were hiring to bring the boys home from the pub in time to watch high-rating shows like The Word.
While earlier glamour girls had their stardom confirmed by being painted on the fuselage of a B-24 Liberator, this new cohort – Patsy Kensit, Gena Lee Nolin, Ulrika Jonsson, Samantha Janus, Denise Van Outen, Melanie Sykes and hundreds more – signalled their arrival in the new, fast-expanding and suddenly babe-hungry arm of the entertainment industry by being immortalised on the cover of FHM in clothes suited to bursting out of a cake at one of Walter Matthau’s stag-evenings. They lined up to get into the cake. Indeed, if there was one person more indignant than the starlet, resentful of being leered at by all the young males in the UK the week her new show/CD/movie dropped, it was the one who wasn’t there because she hadn’t been asked.
There was always something slightly wistful and nostalgic about the version of maleness the magazine tapped into. Mild-mannered men in their twenties who wouldn’t hurt a fly aspired to the swagger of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, pretended to enjoy smoking cigars and sought prestige among their peers by reciting entire scenes from Reservoir Dogs. It was something in the air at the time. ‘Britpop’ was celebrating the UK’s pop music of the 1960s, football was apparently about to come home after thirty years of hurt (the ages since England had won the World Cup) and everything old was new again.
The July 1996 issue, with Samantha Janus on the cover, carried hints of the world which would ultimately sweep it all away. There was an invitation to join FHM Connect, with its promise to get readers on the Information Superhighway via Compuserve. Everybody knew that was coming. However, nobody foresaw the wave of censoriousness which would come with it, in the pitiless glare of which self-deprecating FHM japes like “how to invade a country” would come to be written-off as toxic masculinity and there would be no place at all for referring to Claudia Schiffer as a “curvaceous kraut who’s banging a conjuror”.
Its pictorials may well have featured prominent women in impractical underwear but their style and styling were far away from the genuinely furtive presentation of the top-shelf ‘adult’ magazines. In FHM, you might be in the company of an under-dressed Kylie Minogue but you always felt that the lights were on and there was a make-up artist in the room at all times. It wasn’t sex that the magazine was selling so much as a new form of glamour, a quality owing a great deal to body-conscious clothing and gym membership, which both male and female interest magazines of the time were happy to deal in, with no need to pretend they were doing anything different.
Ultimately, there were two kinds of men’s magazine; the former were those that advertisers liked to think that men read; the latter were the ones men actually did read. FHM was never under any illusion that it was in the latter camp. Conscious of the fact that the popular success of FHM, Loaded and Dennis Publishing’s Maxim exposed the relative unpopularity of their offerings, the likes of GQ, Esquire and Arena retreated into condescension by describing the winners as “lads mags”.
When, in June 1999, FHM marked its Gail Porter issue with the projection of her image on to London’s Houses of Parliament, leading to a sale of over one million copies, the magazine was almost a market to itself and no advertiser selling anything from booze to bikes and watches to fragrances could possible avoid paying the premium it cost to be in the 300 pages of that issue. By then, the magazine had acquired the insane confidence of its imperial phase, submitting comedy actor Leslie Phillips and ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin to its Bloke Test, in the course of which they were asked if they had ever stage dived.
An entire generation of men made the transition from adolescence to adulthood with the help of FHM. Many of these men are now attending parents’ meetings and worrying that their own offspring seem unhealthily attached to screens. Since this was a time when “sharing” was more likely to take the form of buying a copy and taking it back to your flatmates or university hall of residence (where it would be passed from hand to hand for a week rather than simply clicking and dragging) a magazine like FHM was a genuinely communal experience.
At its peak in 2000, FHM was selling an average 700k a month in the UK and was published under licence in more than 30 countries.
No magazine in the UK long survives selling that many copies and FHM was no exception. Magazines which become phenomena no longer feel like secrets shared with a limited number of readers. As with royalty, it does not do to let daylight in on magic. Ubiquity turns on you. The caravan moves on. The FHM format was exported all over the world. Reality TV formats, in which under-dressed young people were kept under surveillance around the clock in the hope they would couple for the cameras, took over from the sisters of Dani Behr. The then UK magazine leaders EMAP and IPC both made the mistake of launching weekly competitors Nuts and Zoo.
Finally, the arrival of the Internet browser revolutionised the delivery of flesh.
The hubbub of British parliamentarians – which had been heard throughout the 1980s and 1990s complaining about the effect that reading magazines was apparently having on the moral fibre of young people – slowly stilled. In 2016, Bauer (which had acquired EMAP’s magazines in 2008) discontinued FHM as a print magazine. Magazines themselves were supplanted by forms of media far less public and immeasurably more harmful, most of which were keen to do away with reading in any form.
In the years since FHM’s closure, print media has become increasingly prim.
Nowadays, every actor is a social justice warrior, every pop record an act of empowerment and the people who once campaigned for less regulation now argue for more. Around the dinner table, the children of the original FHM readers police their parents’ speech. FHM people look back at old issues and wonder how they ever got away with it. They should take another look and realise that, compared with the world in which we now live (the world of deep fakes and Andrew Tate), it was all very tame indeed.
David Hepworth is a British music journalist, author and broadcaster. After becoming editor-in-chief of Smash Hits in the 1980s, he was instrumental in the launch of some of the UK’s most successful magazines – including Seventeen, Empire, Heat, Mojo and Looks – for the former EMAP plc. Since 2016, he has been author of a series of books about music and pop culture, the latest of which is “Hope I Get Old Before I Die” (Bantam, 2024).
