Was it awful for you, too?

On Saturday religious groups will be marching in protest against the proliferation of sex, straight and otherwise, on television. But the real problem, says DAVE HILL, is that TV sex is so bad

ON Saturday an angry alliance of religious groups - Muslims and assorted Christians - mobilised by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, will undertake a "Media March" to Jack Straw's front door to complain about sex on television. There's too much of it, they say, and it's becoming more depraved: "We are now seeing not just explicit nudity and heterosexual sex all around us," reads their letter to the Home Secretary, "but also explicit perversion, such as fetishes, sadomasochism, homosexual and lesbian sex."

These "believers" have no doubt what the effect of all this is: the breakdown of family life, the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe and all sorts of juvenile misdemeanours. They want the laws on obscenity tightened and broadcasters brought under much stricter control: "The media," they conclude, "should be harnessed to support family life and build a better future for everyone." Do these worried people have a point? Not when they brand as "perversion" those sexual preferences, foibles and needs which they believe their gods dislike.

And not in their assumption that when children see sex portrayed on the small screen they immediately go behind a bush and try it out. Such arguments might get more respect if it was conceded that the reverse effect may also be true. The Media Marchers direct particular ire at the return of Queer as Folk, in which, as everybody's vicar already knows, a cast of frisky male Mancunians do the sorts of things that so inflame Baroness Young.

Yet their sexual episodes are so often joyless or absurd it seems possible that impressionable viewers would be put off casual sex, anal or otherwise, for the remainder of their lives.

The Media Marchers are on firmer ground when they complain of an obsession with sex, sex, sex as a way to "spice up" output: the sexualisation of the schedules is now at saturation point. But the key issue about television sex is not simply its ubiquity, or even its increasing variety and candour. The central problem is that so much of it is really, really bad.

Bad sex on the telly is like bad sex itself: afterwards you wish you hadn't bothered. And the bad sex on telly is all over the place. We can deal pretty quickly with what you may find, if so sadly inclined, late at night on subscription channels. Unfeasibly buxom strippers in bierkellers. Sulky girls from Catford pretending to be lesbians.

It all becomes a blur. Channel 5, meanwhile, offers witless "erotic" dramas.

Anyone for Ovaltine? Shows like these simply take the staples of soft pornography and adapt them for TV, thereby representing our most narrow, shallow and sometimes downright unpleasant sexual values, especially those of men. That, I suppose, is to be expected. Still pretty awful sex, though.

You get quite a lot of bad sex in documentaries, too, even in quite good ones like Channel 4's Private Parts. Last week's was less good than I'd hoped for, a bought-in American effort in which a whole bunch of men in various stages of undress talked about their penises, some of which were dangling on display. All the men, true to life, were preoccupied with size: some spoke of size with smiles, some spoke of size with, well, sighs. That was all fine, and the mosaic of tales and voices was endearing. But there were also some things missing: insight, analysis, critique. Vox pop is not always enough.

I preferred the opener to the series, the one about the bit of the female anatomy no one likes to mention. You know the bit I mean: sounds like a small group of Adriatic islands. Visually, this was pretty darned explicit and the Media Marchers will not have been amused. My little quibble, though, isn't about the candour of the images so much as the programme's basic premise. It was fitting that some of the more intimate archive footage showed the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the American sex researchers whose laboratory approach to sexology in the Sixties helped usher the female climax into the limelight. All well and good. But Masters and Johnson also furthered the process by which sexual knowledge has increasingly fallen within the expertise of medical science, reducing it all to organs, orgasms and the application of standardised techniques. Private Parts was a little biological itself and really tiptop telly sex requires a broader approach.

IF Channel 4 (or anyone else) is really in the game of breaking radical new ground, why not a series which goes beyond the shock appeal of rude parts of the body and examines sexual practice and erotic desire for what it really is: a complex and mysterious form of human communication whose nuances are set about with social expectations and constraints.

Sex has become such an obsession on TV not, I suspect, because our appetites have got out of control but because it looms large in the debate about social values in an uncertain age; about our attitudes to others and how we conduct our lives. As such, television has a duty to provide arenas in which that debate may progress, in the form of documentaries, cultural histories and as part of popular dramas about contemporary life. It also has a duty to resist using sex as lazy schedule filler. Quality, sensitivity and creative ambition are at a premium here. Too much bad sex on telly leaves you bored and unsatisfied.

Good sex, though, makes you wise.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.