“Everyone has sex; just some of us film it,” is the phrase Bonnie Blue chooses to introduce her Channel 4 documentary. It’s a suitably glib start to the hour-long film, 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, which charts the controversial OnlyFans star’s rise to global infamy. Aged 26, Blue, whose real name is Tia Billinger, is best known for staging extreme sex stunts; in January, she claimed to have slept with 1,057 men in 12 hours, filming it all for her OnlyFans account, which has since been disabled after the platform banned her.
It’s hard to know where to begin with Blue, who earns upwards of £1.5m per month from her videos, which she now shares on Fansly, another subscription-based social platform. Perhaps with the sheer impossibility of her so-called 1,000-men challenge, which would amount to 41 seconds per man, without accounting for the time it takes to change between them. Then there’s the footage itself, much of which features in the film, showing a fully naked Blue surrounded by penises penetrating her mouth and vagina. Or there’s her litany of rage-bait TikTok videos, in which she urges “barely legal or barely breathing” men to have sex with her, often at the expense of their wives and girlfriends, who Blue happily lambasts as sexually inferior.
Born and raised in the Derbyshire village of Draycott, Blue, according to the film, had a loving, normal childhood complete with dance competitions, a sister she performed with, and parents who were together. All of them are on her payroll. We meet her mother, Sarah, who gushes about how proud she is of her daughter: “If you could earn £1m a month, you’d get your bits out,” she deadpans. Signs of any deep-rooted trauma that many speculate is Blue’s driving force in all this are noticeably absent here. Despite her attempts, filmmaker Victoria Silver (who has a small handful of credits to her name including naturism doc The Great British Skinny Dip) fails to get behind Blue’s ironically impenetrable public image.
Questions about feminism are brushed off as an inconvenience (“but this is what I enjoy”), and Blue refuses to consider the implications her content might have on other women: “They’re not my target audience.” Humour is used as a distraction tool, which provokes a few uncomfortable laughs in the press screening. For example, when Silver, who has a 15-year-old daughter, asks about the potential dangers of a TikTok video of Blue passing a “barely legal girl” around a group of men in balaclavas, Blue simply points out that everyone is clothed, adding: “That could’ve just been a birthday party.”
We never learn why Blue split from her husband, Ollie, whom she met aged 15 and claims to have officially separated from in November 2023; he features briefly in the first part of the documentary (presumably when they were still an item), which was filmed over the course of six months. Nor do we really learn why she actually does any of this: sure, there’s the financial incentive. And as Blue will reiterate to anyone who asks, she really loves having sex. But beyond that, there truly seems to be no real angle.
We do get a behind-the-scenes look at the 1,000-men “challenge” – 1,600 condoms and 50 balaclavas were purchased, and she eats a doughnut midway through – and there are a few strangely sad scenes of Blue telling us how few friends she has while playing puzzles with her “live-in videographer and creative director”, Josh, who used to work with children in care.
With little new information gleaned and far too much time taken up by TikTok and Instagram clips of Blue’s that already exist online, the documentary feels like little more than a prurient exercise to capitalise on one woman’s infamy. Although, maybe it’s simply impossible to ever truly know who Blue is.
Her facade is maintained in person; I attended a Q&A between Blue and Silver that took place after the documentary was screened to journalists. She bats away serious questions with flippant jokes, disparagingly refers to her critics as “fat women who stay at home” while denying her own brazen misogyny, and blaming much of the outrage around her on the media. “They’re the ones who came up with the term ‘barely legal’,” she claims.
Perhaps one of the only moments of verisimilitude comes when we see Blue filming one of her TikTok clips before her 1,000-men challenge. She issues a sultry, doe-eyed invitation to her smartphone, but as soon as she removes the camera, her face falls, almost accidentally slipping into an expression that’s somewhere between exasperation and boredom. Even Silver, who couldn’t quite answer when pressed as to whether she found Blue to be a role model or part of the problem of our pornified culture, seems to have come away from making the film with little insights into who this woman really is. I suspect that’s just how Blue likes it.
‘1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story’ airs on Channel 4 at 10pm on Tuesday 29 July
