For me growing up in the UK it was Tiswas. Always wished I was Sally James

What about you?

For me it was Tiswas too, I always wanted to get pied by Sally James. Also around that era there were lots of cheesy comedy films that showed a bit of boob etc. but often had a messy element such as a girl getting pied or gunged or girls pieing guys.

Me, too. Sally James on Tiswas. Obviously being young, it wasn't a sexual thing then, but I guess in a way it stirred something in me.

I have to says hats off to my father for letting us watch that, instead of the mundane Swop Shop. I'm guessing it was a Sally James thing for him as well . Randy guy, but love him. God rest his soul

I was just hitting puberty at age 11 when TISWAS exploded onto the screens in my TV region (having spread slowly through the ITV network from it's ATV start point). It certainly had an effect.

Then there were several other shows I watched as I grew up which all featured messy games, not going to name them as all kids shows - and if you recognise them please do NOT name them here, UMD does not want to be sending search traffic to kids show websites - but there was one where one male and one female contestants in boilersuits had to try and cross a "swamp" (and always fell in), plus then cross a pool on ropes (and fell in again), there was a show that always ended with at least one fully clothed woman in a gunge tank, and a show that frequently messed up, or watered, it's participants. A few years later on there was an iconic show that tipped women wearing tracksuit trousers and polo shirts into a huge vat of gunge, and then later still there were the general entertainment shows Noel's House Party, and The Crystal Maze.

NHP alternated each week between gunging a male or female celebrity - they rigged it by having two women against each other in the vote one week, and two men the next, so the actual gender balance of the people they gunged was 50/50 across the run of episodes. The Crystal Maze was more hit and miss because it all depended on who played which game, but they still regularly drenched female contestants (all adults) in their "Ocean" zone which was set on a sunken wrecked ship.

By the days of NHP I had formed the idea of one day shooting my own gunge scenes. While their gunge tank was good and got better over time, it had the fundamental flaw that it dumped the falling flow on the victim's head, which meant about 80% of the gunge just bounced off and was wasted being sprayed all over the inside of the tank, missing the victim and blocking the view. I wanted to write to them and suggest they replaced the overhead drop with a mechanism that would spray the gunge at the recipient from the side at shoulder level, drenching their clothes complertely while not wasting any coating the inside of the tank or the victim's head. Of course having actually operated a gunge tank since, I realise that would have been too complicated (and impossible to clean), I get our people to move around and rock back and forwards to ensure their outfits get totally covered, but the people in the NHP tank, not being willing fetish models, tended to freeze hunched forwards most of the time.

I've realised I don't really know where the one thing I'd like to do but haven't seen done anywhere came from though - I've always wanted to be able to lower people, standing on a moving platform, into a vat of gloop, and back out again, multiple times. A former producer came close but their version had people sitting on flexible swings which wasn't quite right and meant you couldn't see the mess level rise up their legs properly, nor watch their bums get messy. Sadly we don't have the height for such a mechanism in our dungeon, plus I suspect it'd be quite expensive to do properly. Still something I'd love to do some day though.

The first was College Mad House and later spinoffs I won't mention when I was young. Then some things from an "unnamed" network ...but it was all peripheral. I'd catch a hot woman and a pie in the face or a sliming or a dunk tank on TV on the side and find myself getting especially excited for them, but being Ace, I didn't feel immediately drawn to it as a "fetish," and still have some complicated feelings about that, as in I'm still conflicted about being present for those things versus seeing them on television.

I didn't realize this kind of fetish community existed until I stumbled on a few Geocities sites in the late 90s and early 00s.

Slapstickstuff, specifically v36, was soon to follow. When I found the SStuff site, all I had for a reference really was those old Geocities sites, which collected material...I didn't realize Rich was producing good shit on his own until SS37 dropped a few weeks later (with Toshia nonetheless in that killer white outfit and hat, DAYUM), and then I realized, "Oh man, people are producing this stuff? There are other people like me and they're doing this FOR people like me?"

I also found Fawn and the WAMF crew right around the same time, but I think they were in their twilight days because I quickly lost track of them.

Back on this side of the pie, uh, pond, probably the Three Stooges and Hal Roach comedies that the local non-network stations showed after school and on Saturdays. The Roach studio included Laurel & Hardy, Little Rascals/Our Gang and other slapstick one-reelers.

I don't recall seeing any slapstick on prime time television (after my bedtime!) but I know now that it was quite frequent and I may have seen starlets in lowcut dresses getting pied. Or for a boy with a good imagination, said starlets standing near some ugly male comic getting pied!

Not sure how specific I can be, but since one particular UK show has been mentioned several times, I think I can at least allude to a few programs? If this violates TOL you can remove.

I've mentioned this a few times over the years, but I swear I had the rumblings of this fetish loooong before puberty. I don't even know if you can classify it as a fetish, since I was literally in elementary school.... But I grew up in an era when pies were flying around on TV, even on the "educational programming" I was allowed to watch on PBS. And I can remember being VERY excited on the rare occasions when Maria, or Winnie, or the legendary Rita Moreno got pied.... To the point of trying to preserve every last detail in my mind, because of course there was no way to rewind or view it again.

Conversely, if one of the guys got pied (or if the scene even LOOKED like it was heading that way), I'd run behind the couch and hide. Sounds crazy, but already there was a clear distinction in my mind where I *only* wanted to see the females get messy.

So if you want to know why The Cream Pie Maniac or "Piece Of Pie" show up so often in early SS scenes.... Man, this stuff was BURNED into my brain at a formative age. I really had no choice. Not that it's the same, but I completely relate to the folks who came out as gay in the 90's and when asked when they "realized" they were gay, would respond, "Oh, even as a little kid I always knew."

Later, there were the other shows that all us '80s kids watched during that decade, but I was locked-in well before then. I mean, at age 9, I witnessed an older girl taking her turn in a pie-throwing booth at the local fair, and I can STILL remember that day crystal-clear. So yeah, I've ALWAYS been like this.

And then it took 2 decades before I realized I wasn't the only one, thanks to MessyFun, but I've told that one before....

I could have written this (except for the fair part)-- almost my same experience to a "T". I still haunt Youtube looking for a copy of the "oops" or "mechanical clown" sketches.

Yeah this was 100% me, especially if there was build-up. If it passed quickly, it was fine, but I remember bolting from the room or hiding behind the armchair if I could sense it coming, especially with a few very specific TV happenings.

And....another one for Sally James! I was lucky enough to have been 19 when Tiswas became a thing...

Two that I never see mentioned:
- Piefight on Growing Pains
- Intro scene for Friends. Yeah it's a fountain, still caught my attention really well!

All of these post Tiswas 80s shows are formative early memories. In addition to these I have a distinct memory of one where a contestant disappeared 'down a plughole' (can't remember the name of the show, and it might not even have been messy). And something where people were dunked into deep foam and disappeared from view, I'm not sure what that was (might have been Tiswas but really don't know). Saturday Roadshow was a big one too, the 'unfairness' of it had a big impact on me. And two Saturday morning shows with the same presenter, especially one year when contestants had to climb an inflatable slide at the end.

I think the 'former producer' is still releasing stuff but I don't know if anyone's buying it...

This was exactly me as well!

I was as young as age 6 when I remember being terrified and changing the channel when a certain US network TV show host would have to get pied by his cute blonde cohost for running out of time in a certain live game but being addicted to watching just for the off-chance she would be pied instead.

I've since come around a bit to co-ed WAM

Can't explain it at all but I've always had this fetish for as long as I've watched TV

Think I vaguely remember that one, but for some reason never really paid much attention.


Don't remember that though I think Tiswas did have a foam cannon they used on the people in the cage at one point so that could be it.


I don't seem to really remember Roadshow, only House Party, was it Roadshow where the vote would be man vs woman, so they gunged way more men that women? Something that was fixed in House Party by always having woman vs woman or man vs man, alternating week by week. I'm wondering if that's why my memory of Saturday evening gunge is so different to The Rev's, we're thinking of different shows?


Was aware of those but somehow never had the appeal of Tiswas. Plus by then I was mid-teens and doing what all mid-teenagers do, staying up till 2am on Friday nights and then sleeping till noon the next day, so Saturday morning TV ceased to really be a thing.


Spotted that the other week. I had a large collection, not watched a single one for the intended purpose since the news broke, just wouldn't feel right. Was clearing down an old laptop the other day to reinstall it to give to a friend who needs a basic computer, there were some useful work files, ISOs for various things, on it, and also a bunch of said producer's scenes I'd forgotten were there. Scanned through a couple out of curiosity - and realised had forgotten all the negative points, particularly the male producer's voice blabbering all over the soundtracks, it was the same on all three I checked. Unwatchable with the sound on, regardless of other considerations.

I'm actually getting back into Erik Elsas' work from The Netherlands, who was someone I really admired 25 years ago. His current models have finally given up on the hideous low-rise jeans that blighted his scenes since the 00s, and at the same time he's re-released remastered versions of some of his late 1990s work, some of which are absolutely glorious, crazy Dutch girls in high-waist jeans just throwing each other into the mud with wild abandon. Need to do a Mothership shopping run on his work.

The earliest pie scene I clearly remember seeing ( and the still remember my sense of excitement too ), was on a Film Clip TV quiz show, where a clip from a film was shown, and the contestants were asked questions..

This one particular show I still vividly recall seeing showed a pie fight scene ...a hall laid out with long tables of red cherry cream pies, and shrieking women flinging and slapping the pies onto each others faces!

It was VERY messy with the women plastering each other...and I remember reimagining the scene for days afterwards ( in fact ever since with variations ) and imagining myself caught up in the pie too

The tank in Roadshow was a quiz rather than a vote, there would be one contestant and a celebrity helping them. The exact rules of the quiz varied I think but it was based around picking a prize and answering a sort of verbal charades question to win the prize. Each prize had a hidden points value and if the combined value of the prizes won went over 100 then the contestant got suddenly gunged. Or if the contestant ran out of time they got gunged. Or if Noel felt like gunging them at the end they got gunged. Sometimes they swapped with the celebrity guest for no real reason. But most of the time the contestant got gunged for losing, for winning too much, or just because. They are all on YouTube if you want to watch them.

TISWAS of course
But before that Crackerjack has some slapstick routines with Peter Glaze and Leslie Crawther.

One scene had Leslie playing the piano ( very well as it happened ) and Peter covering him in all sorts of mess. Leslie continued playing even when his shirt was cut up the back before custard was poured over him

Classic days

And later Clown Julie appeared.
Any news or views on her?

Growing up, there was a constant and forceful demand for cleanliness by my parents. Getting clothes or hair dirty was a punishable offense. At its core, I believe my fetish sprung from this singular influence as a way to both rebel and as a release of the tension that I was constantly under.

Before it became sexual, my initial interest in mess really took shape from the media and personal experiences I had. Being from the US instead of the UK, my perspective on this is quite different from those mentioned so far. Growing up, it was all of the 90s Nickelodeon shows that involved mess, pies, and slime. I watched a LOT of that, which definitely contributed substantially to my interests.

I had a few personal encounters with mess at the summer camp I went to when I was little as well. On one notable occasion, there were two attractive (adult) female counselors who were twins. On their birthday, they were turned into human sundaes. They were hot, the coverage was substantial, they were tied up, and were clearly displeased with it. It definitely awoke something in me. I can still remember where I was standing, the other counselors swarming them to apply the mess, and their hair drenched in chocolate syrup as they walked away. Definitely a core memory!

The summer camp also had a few other mess-related events which they did. I never actively participated due to my fear of getting my clothes messy.

Once my *interest* was sparked from TV and real life experiences, my fetish really blossomed when I began following Yahoo Groups pretty closely, largely with a focus on Pies and slime in the beginning. After finding ECGunge, I ventured into Tellygunge and followed both of them until they closed down.

During that time, I also read a LOT of WAM stories on ECGunge, which I still enjoy doing. Many of my interests likely come from reading those stories. My strong interest in swimsuits and hair coverage over face coverage can definitely be traced back to the Shireburgh series, which I still go back to from time to time. In fact, one of my biggest turn-ons comes from a tidbit in those stories about enclosing mess within a swimcap and working the mess into the hair by massaging the outside of the swimcap (https://web.archive.org/web/20080118021050fw_/http://www.ecgunge.net/stories/Shireburgh/04.htm). The only instance I've ever been able to find of anything remotely like this is a clip from Lente Loco of a shower cap filled with shaving cream being put on a woman's head (https://topwam.com/videos.php?id=1084). If anyone happens to know of any others, I'd be all ears!

It wasn't actually until 9 years ago or so that I joined the UMD, primarily to post my edits of Chega Mais (what an era). Prior to that, I wasn't terribly interested in some of the more sexual aspects of the fetish and was a little turned off by how overt the sexual themes were on UMD.

Being on the UMD and being part of many of the conversations over the years really helped me to understand my sexuality better and feel more comfortable with having a fetish. There was a time when I was quite ashamed of it, but being here helped to normalize it and accept that part of me. It's also opened my eyes to the huge variety of interests and preferences that people have. There are a lot of things I am just not into, but I'm glad that there's a place like this that can serve so many. It's interesting to sometimes hear how close-minded, biased, and uninformed some of my friends can be towards sexual kinks.

This is glorious, very close to what I remember but I don't think this was it. The timing of it is right though, and I was very very young, maybe I was up late (late for an infant) and saw it.

I love how there are two threads to this thread. A USA pie thread and a UK gunge thread.

Obviously some British people like pies and some Americans like gunge, but there has always seemed to be a bias that pies are an American thing and gunge is a British thing (let's be real for a moment and say for the sake of this conversation that gunge and slime are the same thing).

I remember seeing pies in the UK but they never seemed as significant or as ritualised on TV here (apart from maybe on Tiswas which I'm only just slightly too young for), and they never excited me in the same way. What are people's thoughts on this?

My fetish laid dormant until recently when my partner made a request to be gunged using left over mess I had from a previous charity event. It wasn't a sexual thing until I saw it done to the woman I love. Reflecting back it was always in me, my favourite shows as a child were things such as fun house, get your own back and other programs that revolver around getting trashed or trashing someone you didn't like. But now I enjoy the process of setting up the mess, be it buckets of gunge or preparing food and figuring out new ways to make colourful disasters on your "canvas". At the risk of sounding wonky, it is art to me.

Being from the US, I definitely went through stages. Early TV influences tended towards slime/gunge and pies. Pies are definitely a remnant of the American circus/slapstick comedy culture, which didn't necessarily exist in the same way in the UK. As I explored the WAM community, the UK influence of gunge became substantially stronger and I found myself enjoying NHP/GYOB-style gunge, custard, etc.

As I got older, the humiliation/BDSM influence took more of a hold as well as a strong preference for food-based WAM, due to its accessibility, general safety, enormous variety, as well as the feeling of being more "messy" than natrosol-based gunge, which I associate as a soap/lube/thickening agent.

Besides substances, I think there may be more fundamental differences between US WAM and UK WAM. Based on my personal experience, I've generally seen mess in the US being used more as an explicit punishment for losing a competition of some sort, where in the UK, mess may be done more for fundraising events and the like. I would guess that this (in addition to my upbringing) could contribute to my preference of punishment WAM as a turn-on instead of WAM for enjoyment as a turn-on (not that there can't be elements of both).

As I've said before, I wonder if Sally James knows she was Ground Zero for a whole load of Gen X wammers. (I'm not suggesting she should be told.)

As for the pre-puberty stirrings mentioned by Rich, I believe this is how fetishes work - they sink down in the early years, then re-emerge with fireworks when you get to your teens.
For instance, Elvis Presley had a thing for white panties, first glimpsed when his mother and her sister were having a pillow fight - when he was 5.
I can trace mine back to seeing Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman getting her hair shampooed around the same age. I even found a pic of it a while ago.

Growing up during the 90s in America, it was all the messy game shows on a popular cable tv network that first got my interest. I'd seek out the messier shows and I'd get embarrassed if anyone else was in the room with me while I was watching.

It wasn't until my first relationship in the 2000s that it developed into a kink. My first partner also had the same feelings watching those messy game shows growing up. She and I in a spur of the moment started messing around with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and that awoken it with both of us. This was also close to the time that YouTube first hit the scene so that was the first place I would look for messy content before branching off to other sites from there.

I've always wondered if there wasn't such a proliferation of messy television while I was growing up if I would still be into WAM.

Away from TV, "mens mags" such as Fiesta used to do the occasional shoot which inspired. One of which produced (I think) by "Wetshots" of Stoke on Trent showed an English country girl nicely dressed succumbing to a mud pit. Apparently the parents of the girl asked that they do a few clean shots for them.
Nobody seems to have mention Bill Shipton and "Splosh!" surely this must have been an inspiration to many.
Also strangely the video series "Electric Blue" did the occasional messy shoot. One particularly comes to mind of a young lady decorating an old cottage, the wall paper paste got everywhere.
Of course Tiswas morphed into OTT which sadly didn't last. The aspect of Tiswas that was popular was when they emerged out of the studio into what became Centenery Square in Birmingham. The famous fountain shoot completely public along with "The Bucket of Water Song". All happy memories.

OTT was shite. Only one series, and Sally James wasn't in it. Watched a couple of episodes then gave up on it

LOL! And yes, noticing that too.


I remember someone once saying it was mostly down to what you first ever saw that triggered your brain into linking getting messy with being turned on. A lot of older folk from the US seemed to be initiated by 1960s and 70s reruns of 1930s Hollywood slapstick comedies, where pies were dominant. People in the UK were more likely to have seen messy kids shows like the ones mentioned upthread, which tended to be more about full body mess than pies in the face.


I must admit, pies in the face where that's the only area that gets messy do nothing at all for me. I suspect seeing someone pied is partly a humilation kink for a lot of people, take someone, especially a woman in the pre-equality age, where females were expected to be decorative and pristine at all times, and slam a pie into her face, especially in front of an audience or on TV, and that would be very humiliating to most women of that era, and of course various forms of ritual humiliation are massive sexual triggers for lots of people. And I'm not saying anything against it, as long as its safe, sane, and consensual, go them. But it doesn't do anything for me, either visually or theoretically.

I've always preferred the idea of women who are full equals, sexually liberated, and actively enjoy getting messy, find it fun and pleasurable, and actively look forward to it happening. Plus I've always preferred women in no-nonsense practical outfits to things like high-heels and lingerie. Combine those and seeing women in tracksuits or overalls-type outfits willingly throwing themselves into messy games on various shows where they already knew they were in for a drenching. which totally worked for me, and I'm probably about as far from a pie in the face fetishist it's possible to get while still being into WAM.

The first time I was ever aware of a reaction to seeing something messy on TV involved trouser-filling, and then TISWAS tended to be "total mess and drenching shot full-height" rather than pies in close-up. And while I'd seen the odd Hollywood comedy, including the legendary pie fight from The Great Race (which TBH does nothing for me as I really dislike the outfits), none of them triggered anything.

But in general, if you watched messy UK TV, you tended to see full body messings. How were the US game shows that used slime filmed? When the slime fell on the victim, was she shown full-height, or face-close-up? That might make a difference to what audiences got from it.

Me, too.


I'm much more turned on by watching the pie mess drip off her face onto her boobs. But not a pie smashed directly onto the breasts, though, as MW models often did.

When my messy kink started it was almost entirely for outerwear because of two specific scenes:

1. An episode of a game show involving contestants walking across patterned floor tiles. In one episode a random audience member gets selected and winds up getting slimed with the contestant and she has a hoodie on and I felt bad because she was going to have to go home cold and wet.

2. Similar vein - a winter themed episode of Wipeout where the contestant was in one of those pure fleece North Face jackets and went swimming several times.

I have zero clue how I went from winter wear to formal stuff - I think I stumbled upon a trash the dress paint shoot - then found a TopGunge Christmas special on YouTube and discovered that whatever I felt watching Lisa get slimed in an evening dress was not sympathy.

I went on some variation of Proper Messy/WamBabes/FormalPies/Eurowam for a good while.

Then first day of class one year my English teacher walks into the room in a maxi dress. I of course saw this floor length casual dress, went home and googled "gunged in maxi dress", had results, and the rest is history.

Think the signs of me being into WAM were there in the late 90's when watching Get Your Own Back. I was always a bit annoyed when a man vs woman contest almost always seemed to result in the man getting gunged!

I also had the fortune of being in my early teens during the Ministry of Mayhem years. Watching Holly Willoughby get pied/caked/gunged almost every week was a real treat!