70s poster icon is back, so anyone for Tennis Girl?

It was the poster that adorned the walls of countless adolescents at the end of the 1970s and fuelled a million male fantasies. Caught in bright sunlight, a woman tennis player, lopes off court, rather indiscretely scratching a naked buttock.

Now Tennis Girl, taken by photographer Martin Elliott in 1976, is posed for a return match. The £2 poster that helped to establish Athena as the pioneering high-street supplier of cheap art is being reissued, but at a price. For £300, middle-aged men who grow restless as they recall the svelte teenager of the original can have a limited-edition, canvas reprint of the shot for their walls. Until now, the only place to get hold of the poster has been on auction websites such as eBay, where copies of the original can appear for £300.

Elliott, now 60, says the picture was posed at a tennis court in Birmingham. Neither he nor the model - his then girlfriend, 18-year-old Fiona Butler - could actually play tennis and the equipment and whites were borrowed.



Taken as Britain came to the end of one of the hottest summers on record, it was issued as a poster by Athena in 1978 and sold about two million copies. It was a steady seller throughout the 1980s, and only went of circulation in 1994 when Athena's parent company put its troubled high street stores into receivership.

The marketing expert Mark Borkowski cites Tennis Girl as "the first glossy popular pornographic shot", adding: "It was fairly innocent - it was one of those student posters."

However, he believes its revival now is purely driven by nostalgia. "The need for those kind of bedroom images is now fulfilled by lads' magazines. It's playing on nostalgia, there will be more publicity than there will be sales."