A Basingstoke man is calling foul after his garden shed – which he has converted into a sex dungeon – was disqualified from the local heat of the Southern Counties Shed of the Year contest. “It’s bloody ridiculous – the organisers have claimed that it isn’t ‘family friendly’ and contravenes the contest’s guidelines! Not only have they disqualified me, but they’ve reported me to the local police, as well,” fumes forty eight year old Solomon Praddler, who, before the disqualification, had high hopes of his shed winning not just the local heat, but the regional contest as well. “I wouldn’t mind, but the buggers haven’t even seen the shed for themselves! The first I knew of it all was when I opened the letter they sent me – by second class post incidentally, the cheap bastards – telling me of their decision. Apparently they’d seen the item on local TV about my shed and decided on the basis of that film that they didn’t want it in their competition!” The film, made by local news station That’s Basingstoke as part of their coverage of the competition’s local heat, features Praddle proudly showing their reporter around his shed. “I’ve blacked out all of the windows and installed a heavy duty metal support in the roof, to hang all the chains and manacles from.” he is seen telling the reporter, adding proudly that he is able to have two veiling suspensions going on simultaneously. He goes on to show her the wall mounted rack for his whips and crops, brazier and branding iron and even the rack he has installed in the shed.

Praddle insists that there is nothing odd in converting a garden shed into a sex dungeon. “It makes perfect sense when you consider that my house doesn’t have a cellar (the usual venue for such things),” he contends, “so it is only logical that we should set up shop in the shed, instead. I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved at the end of my garden – it’s given me and my wife many hours of pleasure and I just wanted to share that with my fellow shed enthusiasts.” Praddle is aggrieved at the decision to exclude his shed as he feels that some of the entrants that have been approved are also far from being ‘family friendly’. “Just take that retired priest who has turned his shed into some kind of cathedral,” he says. “He has a bishop’s throne in there, which apparently means it is cathedral, not just a chapel. Anyway, the point is that they never mention why he had to ‘retire’, do they? Well, I’ve heard all the stories and all I’ll say is that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of choir boys hadn’t been felt up – or worse – in that tool shed he’s turned into a vestry!”

Praddle has also railed against the competition’s inclusion of another local shed, this one turned into a miniature police station. “I won’t deny the amount of effort the geezer who owns the thing has put into it,” he says. “That front desk looks really authentic, but what worries me are the cell and interrogation room he has recreated in there – I’ve heard that he’s taken to locking up people he believes to be local miscreants in that cell!” Indeed, Praddle claims that the shed’s owner – who was once turned down not only for police service, but also as a special constable, PCSO and lollipop man, has taken to dressing in a fake police uniform and ‘patrolling’ his local area after dark. “It was bad enough when he was just locking his neighbours up overnight over things like their cats crapping in his garden,” says Praddle. “But now he’s prowling around ‘arresting’ people on utterly spurious charges. Onlt the other night he apprehended and incarcerated a lady from two streets away for soliciting – she was waiting for a bus and is seventy six years old!” He has also expressed fears about reports of ‘interrogations’ taking place in the police station shed. “The way I’ve heard it, there are more beatings going on there every night than happen in a week in my shed,” Praddler claims. “How can that be ‘family friendly’?”

But Praddler reserves his greatest ire for a local shed which has supposedly been converted into a photographic studio by its owner, described by the competition organisers as a ‘teenage entrepreneur’. “Entrepreneur my arse! He’s just a mucky little git producing dirty pictures for the web,” splutters Praddler. “He started off using that shed to store, read and whack off to, his highly impressive collection of jazz mags (mainly sourced from hedgerows), because he didn’t have enough room for it all in his bedroom – apparently his bed was two feet off of the floor he had so much smut stashed under it.” According to the forty eight year old, the teenager eventually he graduated from just using the shed as a repository for his smut, to turning it into a ‘photographic studio’, where he took shots of various girls from the local convent school, in various states of undress. All under the pretext that he was helping them put together ‘portfolios’ for their modelling careers whilst they were helping him out with his art A-level course work. “If that doesn’t contravene competition guidelines, I don’t not what does!” rages Praddler.

Despite being barred from competing in the Shed of the Year contest, Praddler still hasn’t heard from the police. A development which doesn’t surprise one of his neighbours. “I know he says that it is just for personal use and during the week that’s true – it’s just him and his wife who use it – but on weekends he invites round friends, so that they can enjoy being suspended from the ceiling and whipped,” fifty six year old Peter Fixturn has told The Sleaze. “Several local Tory councillors and a police superintendent are reputedly regulars – that’s why he’s never been raided or anything, despite the fact that everyone knows what goes on there. I just wish that he’d soundproof it better – the moans and screams often make it difficult to sleep at weekends.” Fixturn isn’t surprised that the shed has been thrown out of the contest, though. “The organisers have got very twitchy since they featured that shed that was being used as mad scientist-style lab a couple of years ago,” he explains. “They thought it was some kind of role playing thing, but it turned out that they guy who owned it was digging up corpses from the local graveyard, dismembering them and stitching bits together to create his ‘ideal woman’. It was quite a scandal – eventually the bloke burned to death when the shed was struck by lightning as he tried to animate his she-creature.”