Nudity: from TV newscasts to the classroom

Having learning French? Need some help with those German lessons? Then speak to Jesse Au King-wai, who has a novel idea for teaching languages.

"Naked teachers are the way forward," says the excitable 34-year old who is leading a mini-sexual revolution in usually straight-laced Hong Kong.

"I want to make nudity educational, as well as entertaining."

Au not your regular pornographer. An animator by trade, his company Lemonation does most of its business creating and distributing children's animation, taking Japanese manga programming and selling it on to China.

He got into the sex industry almost by accident after taking a job with a Japanese video company. Now, Lemonation runs Hong Kong's newest adult digital TV channel Fire/Ice where Au is intent on breaking as many taboos as possible.

"I like the idea of putting together things that shouldn't go, like education and nudity," Au says in a hurried phone call during a 10-minute slot in a schedule he describes as exhausting.

His latest televisual creation fits that ethos perfectly. Fire/Ice News is a five-minute late-night new bulletin presented by a stripper.

In the first show, which was aired Saturday, 18-year-old model Chan Long stripped down to her underwear as she read the news before ending the show completely naked.

"It's obviously not a show that will be watched for its news coverage," said Au, who writes the reports himself. "It's just a different way of presenting two old and often tired forms of programming -- the news and adult content."

In his quest to upset TV norms Au hopes to create something that approaches art.

"It's not art in itself, but it is creative in a way that hasn't been dealt with before in Hong Kong. I like to do different things -- and make people think."

Au's Fire/Ice News is not a new concept -- he got the idea from a similar show on a Japanese adult TV channel. It also takes a cue from the online Canadian news show nakednews.com.

But for Hong Kong the naked news bulletin is nothing short of revolutionary.

"People have been talking about doing this sort of thing for a long time but they just couldn't get over the cultural obstacles -- Hong Kong can be very conservative when it comes to sex."

Hong Kong's adult channels are filled with bought-in content from Japan or Korea. Au says it's practically impossible to find local adult content because cultural taboos mean there are few people willing to appear in it.

Indeed, such has been the difficulty in finding local girls -- and boys -- to appear naked on TV that Au says he had thought about shelving his naked news plan for good.

"Hong Kong is a small place and it's difficult to find girls who are prepared to go naked on TV because there is a chance they will be seen by people they know.

"It's not like in Japan, which is a big country and girls from one part of it can appear on TV and not be recognized by people in any other part of the country."

Fire/Ice News is not going to win Au the Pulitzer prize, but he says he expects the show to open the floodgates to more local adult programming.

"Hong Kong people are conservative in that they don't like to speak about sex, but with so many people using prostitutes here it's obvious that these sorts of things go on.

"I'm just making it easier to deal with nudity by presenting it in a different way, away from the sleaze that it's usually associated with."