Satellite viewers can cross over to transvestism: Rhys Williams reports on a sex channel with a difference

UNSIGHTLY satellite dishes will no longer seem controversial when the latest development in extra-terrestrial television is launched before Christmas - a channel devoted to transvestites and the world of cross-dressing.

After a six-week test period beginning on 18 December, the Transformation channel will be scrambled and available only on subscription. 'It will be just like the BBC,' Stephanie Anne Lloyd, its founder, said yesterday. 'We won't have to advertise to earn our revenue.' That is just about where the resemblance ends. While Transformation will offer discussions, news, quizzes, advice programmes and dramas, it will also carry its share of uncut recordings of Bangkok 'she- male' floorshows and uncensored films. 'We've got to cater for the whole spectrum, from the very straight, if that's the right word, cross-dresser to the fetish angle,' Ms Lloyd said.

This is not to say the corporation could not learn a thing or two from the new channel about selling itself. 'TVs on TV,' a Transformation promotional leaflet promises. 'To be tuned in is to be turned on - for little more per week than the cost of a packet of cigarettes.'

Ms Lloyd's credentials in this field are impeccable. She was born Keith Hull in 1946. After marrying and fathering three children, she opted for a sex change in 1983. It took two years of hormone therapy and a nine-hour operation for Stephanie Anne Lloyd to emerge from the bespectacled frame of the former sales executive and Rotary club member.

With her husband, David Booth, she now heads the Transformation group, which includes a chain of six transvestite shops, a sexual therapy clinic, a publishing division and a film production company. Ms Lloyd dismisses any notion that the programming will be 'tacky'. But even if the Government wanted to move against Transformation, it could not ban it until after broadcasts begin. Only then can it act on a recommendation from the Independent Television Commission. This procedure was followed this year against Red Hot Television, which transmitted pornographic films into British living rooms, initially from the Netherlands and then Denmark.