There was a joke, or meme as they're now called, doing the rounds a few months ago. The idea was that if a Victorian person was forced to listen to the chaotic hyperpop of a Charli XCX or 100 gecs, they would cry tears of blood, and their heads would explode. To the industrialist's mind, the squeaking production of AG Cook or Danny L Harle or whoever would simply be too much for their minds to handle. I'm not so sure this would be the case. But I do think if you showed someone born in 1847 Pornhub, OnlyFans, and the limitless, varied, on-demand choice of blue entertainment they could consume, it would instantly send them cuckoo.

Well, the volume might send them mad. Perhaps the content wouldn't. The dawn of photography meant that the relatively graphic Georgian sex caricaturists were out of a job, and posed photographs of sex acts were now de rigueur. There is a picture that comes to mind when imagining Victorian erotica; blurry plate photography of Rubenesque nude women, usually in some woodland setting – a snatched picture of a forest nymph. But much of the illicit, underground work was decidedly more modern: entangled group sex photos, gay men in billowing dresses proffering their tumescences at each other, inter-racial sapphic love ins – fetishism and flagellation was of course a favourite of the maniacally repressed Victorian Brit. The trade of these images was hugely popular, and, like all things society wants but can't have, proved incredibly lucrative for those who produced them.

As the country moved into the 20th century, a new form of puritanism began to take shape. As film began to become more common, the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC – later the British Board of Film Classification) was created to embody this burgeoning attitude of saving the public from licentious post cards, penny dreadfuls, and gin palaces. This censorship infrastructure paved the way for 1959's Obscene Publications Act, creating a mid-century pornographic environment vastly out of touch with that of our European neighbours.

Simon Sheridan is a writer and filmmaker, and the director of Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy. "Filmmakers and people who made TV in the 1950s and 1960s had to adhere to those rules for fear of being prosecuted," he tells me over the phone. "British films always had to tread a fine line between what was considered acceptable or obscene. The BBFC passed films with nudity if it was open to interpretation, whether they were there to turn men on or to educate. So long as you could claim context you could get away with it."

While Sheridan very much does not think that the British sex comedy is "pornography" with a capital P, he understands that Britain's repressionary culture around sex, and our seeming inability to take it seriously, is what made the sex comedy so popular among the booby-starved public.

"The film that really revolutionised British sex cinema was School for Sex (1968), set in a finishing school where women learn to ensnare men using their sexuality," he tells me. "It opened the floodgates for mixing sexual content with jokes." Then, in July of 1970, the BBFC changed the X-rating from 16 to 18, which "allowed more explicit material to be shown. That opened the floodgates to sex films and comedies." Perhaps surprisingly, the audiences of these films were a lot less monogendered than one might think. "I think it's always a fallacy to assume that sexual films, sex films, whatever, were only enjoyed by men because they weren't," Sheridan muses. "They were enjoyed by women as well. Maybe not to the same extent, of course..."

Sex comedies may not have been as graphic as the video nasties that came after them, but they set a certain groundwork for who the British porn protagonist would be. The archetypes of the Carry On style films would be present in the sex comedies, or as Sheridan puts it: "There'll always be a posh bird. A slutty girl. There'll be a 'MILF' – a middle-aged woman. There'd be a repressed homosexual."

But the archetype that really came to the fore was the working-class lad, on the job, blushing as an undersexed housewife gives him the come-on. 1974's Confessions of a Window Cleaner was the top-grossing British film that year, and Robin Askwith's Timmy Lea, a bumbling tradesman irresistible to woman, who can't believe his luck, became the model on which the British porn leading man would be based on.

As British porn moved into the VHS era, Mr Ben Dover became synonymous with the new age of rentable grot tapes. As his pun name suggests, Dover's films continued the tradition that the sex comedy had started, and across the decade his Ben Dover series included such classics as Buttman's Bouncin' British Babes, Ben Dover's British Butt Search and Ben Dover's English Muffins. But Dover fell, as many others did, to the long cock of the law. Even in the 1990s it was illegal to distribute "hardcore porn" (that is, penetration and the rest) and so, after a lengthy sting operation, Dover was imprisoned for four months for "publishing obscene material for gain" and "being in possession of obscene material" (as well as some good old fashioned tax fiddling).

At the dawn of the new millennium, the British porn trade changed. The Obscene Publications Act was no longer enforceable with the onslaught of DVDs and online videos, and so in 2000, rather perfunctorily, the distribution of "hardcore porn" (remember, that term here means penetrative sex) was legalised, though of course under anachronistically strict conditions.

This flurry of globalised filth meant that the jovial timbre of the British porn of yore fell by the wayside. The Yanks were steamrolling on, producing glossy sex tapes replete with a superabundance of silicon at an astonishing rate. The cheeky chappy took a fag break and didn't seem likely to return. That is until 2012, when YouPorn founder Jonathan Todd created a little faux-reality series called FakeTaxi.

The premise of FakeTaxi is simple: a girl gets into a black cab, an anonymous cockney driver offers a free ride for a free ride, and they get it on in the spacious carriage. A working-class man, on the job, tries his luck with a filly, joking along with her and making classically bawdy comments that verge on the childish. It was a return to the conceptual and spiritual home of British porn, and proved hugely popular, allowing Todd to sell the majority of the site to Aylo (owner of Pornhub) and launch other "Fake" franchises, including Fake Driving School, in which a ginger Scot attempts to teach busty women how to parallel park before the clothes come off.

So where does this character live now? One might say that the de facto leader of the British porn scene, Bonnie Blue, has traces of this identity in her personality.

Clarissa Smith is a Professor of Film and Media at Northumbria University. "There is a bit of that oddly British shocking the neighbours thing [with Bonnie Blue]," she tells me over a Zoom call. "I think the gangbang really is an affront to Puritan ideas."

Today's porn actresses are not just porn actresses; they are in effect influencers in their own right, and like all other forms of video-based digital goldrush, the output has to be healthy, the content diverse, the personality popping. Many OnlyFans models have branched out into, among other things, podcasting, stand-up comedy and football mascotry. "I think working in adult content has always required people to be multitaskers, we wouldn't have talked about them as gig workers or content providers before in quite the way that we do now," says Smith.

"OnlyFans really highlights just how much work is involved in being a performer, that actually, it isn't just that constant refrain of 'oh, these women aren't doing very much, all they do is take their clothes off', as if there's nothing else that's involved in performing sexiness for a paying audience."

The recent Online Safety Act – essentially requiring you to provide a form of ID verification before you can ogle a mattress actor – is a spiritual successor of the Obscene Publications Act, and once again brings to light the constant struggle between Britain's Puritan surveillance culture, and its deep-seeded desire for muck. And it's hurting creators. "We have this habit of swinging between moral panic and regulation in this country. And it's always repeating old patterns, right?" says Smith. "So, the Online Safety Act is doing the same thing. It says it wants to protect people while at the same time, ignoring entirely the voices of the people who are likely to be most affected by it."

"There has not been one element of review of what's going on in pornography, in the UK, at least, that has involved any of the people who are mostly affected by any regulation that gets brought in, to my knowledge. Not one of the panels that get set up has a member of the sex worker community on it – but there's religious organisations, of course."

It feels as if Britain will always be in a constant boxing match with our priggish lawmakers, themselves often historically embroiled in seedy scandals of their own, and the populace who are desperate to liberate themselves from the Puritanical confines of their motherland. As history tells us, as with other crusades against the human need to feel something, laws can never overcome desire. The Online Safety Act is just another attempt at the UK to hide its erection in its waistband.