No sex, please - we Brits are still prudes at heart

13/10/2013 00:00

By Hugh Ash

FRANKLY, it’s been a lousy week for sex. Not, I hasten to add, from any personal perspective – what I and the love of my life get up to in our boudoir is strictly private and I need no further reminders the ceiling needs painting – but for entertainment reasons.
   The very word ‘sex’ is probably the most emotive, three letter expression in the English language.
Mere mention risks extreme reactions, extending from a fit of the vapours to horny leering.
   Still, none of us would be here without it, despite every son and daughter’s worst nightmare being the thought of their parents actually locked in steamy embrace, something kids seem to believe is an invention they’ve just patented.
   Sex was, is and, I predict, will continue to be a highly marketable commodity – and I’m not referring to the world’s oldest profession, even if one, celebrated bordello queen once confided, ‘You’ll never go broke peddling nookie, love.’
   I rush to add (again) this pearl of wisdom was disclosed to me during a court case she starred in, one of the highlights of which was her acceptance of Luncheon Vouchers as part-payment for services rendered.
   Nonetheless, some Brits retain a rather prudish attitude to a topic they’re almost too embarrassed to mention by name and thus reduced to using metaphors, like ‘it’, ‘you-know-what’, ‘hanky-panky’ or ‘a roll in the hay’.
   This tests artistic creativity, since writers, movie makers and TV directors face a double dilemma: they know most readers and viewers are titillated by sex…but what makes good or bad sex and how explicit dare they be?
   In 50 Shades of Grey, E.L. James tapped into a previously taboo market: female fetishism and did so with such gusto no publisher would touch her book with a bargepole.
Then it passed the test of public scrutiny by going viral on the internet and the big print houses queued up to seize it.
   I’ve recently wrestled with a similar problem in penning a sex scene – necessary to the plot – for my new thriller, The Mallorca Correspondent, in which a vampish British government minister is seduced into a one-night stand by an MI6 agent.
   Only nine paragraphs long, it took me three days to write, rewrite, re-rewrite and polish, since I wanted it to be sensuous, but fall short of the dark threshold of being porn.
   Does it work? Dunno, but of the readers who’ve downloaded the book from Amazon and elsewhere, no-one’s complained. Yet!
   In part, I blame innate, British oversensitivity to dealing with sex in any entertainment medium, because we’ve always assumed we do it badly.
   Hence we buy into the myth Frenchmen are the world’s best ‘louvers’, which, I understand, isn’t an opinion French women necessary share (unless the pong of garlic acts as an aphrodisiac).
   My old Latin master, ‘Codface’ Roberts, subscribed to the view that the world would be a better place if the British were in charge of policing, the Germans economics, the French culinary matters and the Italians affairs of the heart.
   ‘Instead, what do we get?’ he’d muse, rhetorically.
‘The Germans insist on being Kaisers of the bedroom, the French want to control law and order, the Italians grab the purse strings, while we British get lost in the kitchen.’
   Maybe that’s why last week’s telly was such a flop.
It stooped to exploit the shock value of sex and not necessarily in the best possible taste.
   Downton Abbey was panned because it featured the rape of lady’s maid, Anna, though, as actress Joanne Froggatt, who played the victim, insisted, it dealt with the traumatic aftermath, not the event in gratuitous detail.
   Still, ITV received over 200 complaints.
And that underscores my point that we Brits don’t altogether ‘do’ sex, since many of us are still locked into a mindset that it’s off limits and best left to Johnny Foreigner.
   At least Downton made an honest stab at exploring the moral bewilderment faced by women abused by vicious, sexual predators and how all sense of reason vanishes.
If anything, Anna’s lame attempts to deal with what she believed was her abiding shame is why so many rapes go unreported.
   In contrast, the Sex Box on Channel 4 was such unmitigated dross, only Channel 5 could have contrived a bigger hash.
It was telly at its worst – sexploitation posing as pseudo-science and scrapping the barrel’s nether regions – unfunny, uninformative, despite its pretensions, and a candidate for worst show of all time.
   Part of C4’s Real Sex season, it purported to be a tutorial in sex-craft, fronted by Mariella Frostrup, who couldn’t help but reprised her ladette credentials, even while trying to stifle smutty clichés.
The show’s premise was three couples entered a bedroom-sized box, ostensibly had it off, then discussed their experience with sexperts (what is a sexpert, by the way, and how do you qualify to be one?).
    ‘Did you have a nice time?’ Mariella asked one pair, hardly able to contain her prurience.
   Only they didn’t. Overcome by coyness, the ‘contestants’ might as well have been playing Mahjong inside the Box and an explanation about the arcane version of Chinese gin rummy might have been a damned sight more enlightening.
   Meanwhile, C4’s sordid Real Sex play-list in this must-miss series includes The Week The Women Came, with handy tips for rousing female libido; the self-explanatory Date A Porn Star, Porn On The Teenage Brain – a no-brainer if ever there was one – and Virgins, where youngsters discuss the pressures of embarking on a first sexual relationship.
   With the possible exception of Date A Porn Star, some of these progs could be interesting and instructive in isolation.
However, lumped together by a trashy tag and a mock orgy of suggestive obscenity as lame as brewer’s droop, a poke in the eye with a sharp stick would seem a preferable alternative.
   If the object of the series, then, was to address our outmoded misconceptions and confusion about so contentious a topic, it missed the point by the proverbial country mile.
   So please, Channel 4, leave us with our sexual hang-ups.
After all, we’re British.