Derek Horn wanted to direct the spot for Nearly Naked Lingerie because he loved the script – so much so that he offered to work cut-rate. But the Avion Films director never expected his commercial debut to elicit so much controversy and splash his name in the national press.

Nearly Naked is a small Toronto operation specializing in the sheer and silky garments that make men’s hearts go thump. The spot depicts two male bank robbers so enamored with the sensation of pantyhose pulled tight over their faces that they forget the heist and, instead, get it on in the back of the getaway van.

‘It’s funny,’ Horn says. ‘It depends on who you talk to. Some people love it and some people are shocked that it would ever end up on the air.

‘Our take on this has always been that the only thing that seems to make this thing racy is that it’s two men. If it was a man and a woman in the back then no one would even say boo about it.’

Horn, 29, adds he’s surprised that people are still shocked by the idea of gay sex.

The $20,000 spot, which originated out of Palmer Jarvis ddb, opens with three robbers pulling stockings over their heads and leaping out of a van. As the leader enters a bank, his two henchmen remain outside admiring the feel of the sheer stockings. When the lead robber inside the bank cannot find his cohorts, we see the van outside rocking as a woman passes with a baby carriage.

While causing a stir, it is also the kind of publicity most young directors can only dream of.

Almost immediately, the media had its teeth in the whole issue of gay sex on tv. The National Post ran a story Nov. 29 under the headline ‘Selling homosexuality.’ Reuters, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and trade mag Marketing all followed suit.

The Telecaster committee, which decides whether ads are suitable for nearly 100 Canadian stations, also got into the act and put the spot under review. It was given the go-ahead before Christmas.

Horn says the image of these guys becoming romantic in that particular situation has the classic elements which make for great comedy. ‘The element of surprise and the contradiction of logic is the essence of comedy,’ he says. ‘That’s what we were going for.’

And while most viewers get the joke, some do not.

‘I had a client tell me it was absolutely disgusting,’ says Avion partner and executive producer Paola Lazzeri. ‘I guess it’s a very personal issue.’

The commercial runs exclusively on Toronto’s Citytv late Friday nights during the station’s Baby Blue soft-core porn movies. Horn laughs when he points out that the Nearly Naked Lingerie spot runs between phone sex ads featuring scantily clad young women writhing on beds offering to titillate viewers for 40 cents a minute.

Horn, who cut his teeth directing music videos for such performers as Age of Electric, Chantal Kreviazuk and Amanda Marshall, has also completed spots for

i-Money and Greenpeace.

He says the script for Nearly Naked was so funny that he made a conscious effort not to get in the way of the story ‘with a bunch of style.’ To do so, Horn kept the filming very simple and let the story tell itself, he says.

And while the story was simple, the action around the spot was anything but. But as the saying goes, ‘There is no such thing as bad publicity.’

The creative team at Palmer Jarvis was David Chiavegato and Rich Pryce-Jones and Mark Stoiber was creative director; Danielle Schwartz was producer.