When you have one hundred and forty pounds of weights dangling over your head the sounds of hot embraces, husky voices, sighs, panting, thrusts and counter-thrusts can sometimes be a shade distracting. This was Le Club Musculation's big drawback. The elite gym could well have been the only one in England (although maybe not in Wales) where the sound of bodices and silken under-garments being ripped off with great gusto was par for the course when it came to the routine performance of squats, bench presses, and dumb-bell exercises.
Three of the walls of Le Club Musculation were formidable constructions built out of the finest Bath stone. However the fourth wall did not quote fit the bill. The fourth wall was constructed in the classic 1940s' paper-thin prefab tradition. And it was the fourth wall which had the Herculean task of separating Le Club Musculation from the small auditorium of the cinema next door.
Only a handful of risque films were publicly screened in sleepy Somerset towns in the early post-war decades. Managers of the mainstream Beau Nash, Scala, and Odeon cinemas could be relied on to give a thumbs-down to any films which gave off a hint on avante-garde sensibility. Only the Arty Little Cinema was different. And it was the Arty Little Cinema which was the other side of Le Club Musculations' fourth wall.
This meant that just a few slivers of cardboard and crumbling plaster stood between the deep breathing passionate weightlifters who were stretching out their physiques out on Le Club Musculation's sweaty benches and the deep breathing passionate actresses who were stretching out their somewhat more lithe physiques on sweaty Parisian and Stockholm bedsteads on the screen of the Arty Little Cinema. The weightlifters of Le Club Musculation did not have anything against Erotic Sound Effects per se. ("Au contraire!" as the slick salesman who lived in prefab number forty-six in Woodhedge Road would have been the first to say.) What ruffled the weightlifters' feathers was what they called "unexpected trajectories." (i.e. the sudden intersection of a burst of Erotic Sound Effects with a highly-exacting and potentially life-threatening heavy object weight movement.) First-aid records show that hardly a month went by in 1962/1963 without a hyper-ventilating weightlifter losing himself in a world of nubile fantasy and dropping a fifty-pound dumb-bell on another weightlifter's foot. (And on one tragic occasion on another weightlifter's delicate protruding body part.)