It discusses the genre of English saucy seaside postcards that were sold mostly in small shops in British coastal towns, and particularly the work of its prime exponent, Donald McGill.
[3] In "Such, Such Were the Joys" Orwell reports his alarm at being stared at with suspicion by a man as he came out a newsagent's shop in Eastbourne, although he says in the essay that he was buying sweets.
Orwell picks out the main subjects of the postcards as sex, home life, drunkenness, WC jokes, snobbery within the working-class, stereotypical figures and topical politico-social fads.
They feature illegitimacy, the mother-in-law, the hen-pecked husband, the middle-aged drunk, chamber pots, the nervous clergyman who says the wrong thing, malapropisms and "an endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses."
He sees comic post cards as the only medium in which really "low" humour is printable although similar jokes are part and parcel of the revue and music-hall, and can be heard on the radio.
The postcards represent the worm's-eye view of life where "marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster... where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand".