Murray's Cabaret Club, 16-18 Beak St, London: Soho's scandal central

Murray's Cabaret Club, an intimate Soho basement with space for 110 guests, opened in 1933. Three decades later, it would play a crucial role in one of the most enduring political scandals of our time.

Murray's was renowned for its "dancers" — girls wearing elaborate and revealing costumes who performed choreographed floor shows and worked as hostesses. In the early 1960s, Christine Keeler, then a teenage runaway, became a hostess at Murray's. She later recalled that her main task was to "walk around naked" in a low-lit room with deep-red carpets and gilt furniture. In fact, the girls were topless, not completely nude.

Gangsters rubbed shoulders with celebrities and royals: the membership list was kept secret, but Princess Margaret and Jean Harlow were regulars. Murray, known as ‘Pops’ to the girls he employed, spent the club’s profits on holidays in the French Riviera, and on a lavish Surrey home from which he would commute to the club every night in one of his two chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces.

It was at Murray’s that Keeler met Stephen Ward, a sex-party host and society osteopath. He introduced her to war minister John Profumo, with whom she began an affair. In 1962 she became the focal point of one of biggest sex scandals of the 1960s when it emerged that she was also having an affair with Eugene Ivanov, a naval attaché based at the Russian embassy. This fact proved fatal for Profumo's career and hastened the end of the Macmillan government. The other call girl at the centre of the scandal, Mandy Rice-Davies, had also worked at Murray's.

Pops Murray was afraid the notoriety the club gained would be bad for business, but instead punters queued around the block. The club's heyday passed, however, and it closed in 1975, in the face of competition from more explicit strip clubs and peep shows. Murray himself died in 1979 aged 81, though the venue continues to host a nightclub popular with celebrities: Kabaret's Prophecy, favoured by Janet Jackson and Scarlett Johansson.

Today, Keeler lives quietly in north London; Mandy Rice-Davies in America. John Profumo has devoted the rest of his life to philanthropic work. Ivanov returned to Moscow and was never heard of again.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

"My administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of co-operation between the president and the air-traffic controllers."

Translation: "Once I've been re-elected, you'd better do as you're bloody well told."

Ronald Reagan couches the harsh reality in a letter to the Air Traffic Controllers' Union during his election campaign in 1980. When the controllers went on strike in 1981, Reagan sacked them.

STATS ENTERTAINMENT

Immaculate conception

Most men produce an estimated 1.2 trillion sperm during their lifetime. That fewer babies are coming into the world is a credit to birth-control measures that are more effective and varied than ever before.

It also reflects an increase in the biological problems that might affect would-be parents. For those wishing to conceive, but finding themselves unable to do so, it is no comfort to know that the average male body produces something in the region of 72m sperm a day — and it only takes one squiggly tadpole to make a baby. With every ejaculation, a man says goodbye to between 200m and 600m sperm swimming at speeds of up to 4 millimetres a minute. Of course, it helps to send them off in the right direction. A sperm will live for up to two days inside a woman, compared with the two-minute life span they enjoy after hitting the bed sheets. Although the farthest-known ejaculation involved semen travelling an astonishing 3.5 metres, it is useful to be in the vicinity of the intended mother of your child.

NEXT BIG THING

That's snowbiz

Imagine four snowboarders racing hell for leather down a steep, bumpy, windy course, where pushing and shoving are allowed. It can lead to serious ligament injury; sometimes even death. It's an event called 'snowboardcross', and Zoe Gillings is ranked No 4 in the world. How did she feel when she heard that Line Ostvold of Norway suffered head-and-neck injuries before a world-cup race in September and died five days later? "It didn't make me want to race any less," says Gillings, 19, from the Isle of Man, "but it's a terrible thing to happen. But riding alongside my competitors is one reason why I love the event."

Snowboardcross will be introduced as an official event at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006.