Should we kill off erotic TV scenes?

As social distancing makes filming them impossible...

SAVE the Great British sex scene! As TV crews return to work after months of lockdown, a debate has started about whether dramatised scenes of physical intimacy are viable in the age of Covid-19.

How on earth do you have two characters meet and make love when they are supposed to only see people in their ‘social bubble’?

To which my answer is: are you mad? Nothing stops sex. Not wars, famines or pandemics. Otherwise the human race would have died out years ago.

As in real life, so in drama. During the long months of social distancing, sex on the box lifted the nation’s spirits. Why else was the BBC’s erotic Normal People such a hit?

Steamy scenes aren’t just about the vicarious pleasure of watching two attractive people. The way in which an individual approaches intimacy tells you screeds about their personality. Just think of the coldly seductive, bisexual Villanelle in Killing Eve, who is as ruthless in bed as she is when working as an assassin. Conversely, a buttoned-up character such as Keeley Hawes’s Home Secretary in Bodyguard can show an unexpectedly passionate side in the confines of a hotel room.

Sex is vital to the pace of a drama. Where is the pleasure in an intense build-up of erotic tension if you’re then cheated of the cathartic moment when two characters come together at long last?

Try imagining The Night Manager without Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan finally, electrifyingly, making love to Elizabeth Debicki’s Jed. If you think the series would have benefited from the erasure of Hiddleston’s taut buttocks, you’re not living in the same viewing universe as most of us.

Apart from anything else, ditching hot clinches would erase all the recent progress that’s been made to ensure gender parity in sex scenes.

One reason Normal People was so admired was the effort made to show women’s sexuality on equal terms to men’s. The use of an ‘intimacy coach’ was also cited as a reason why the scenes were so authentic. Similar attention to equality of pleasure was evident in Netflix’s Sex Education, where Otis is shown striving to work out the mysteries of female anatomy.

So let’s not lose the passion. Directors can film the non-sex scenes first, then shoot the steamy scenarios in a ‘bubble of intimacy’ at the end. If actors have to quarantine afterwards, then it’s a worthwhile production cost, as the record-busting ratings for Normal People show.

More sex please, we’re British!

‘Normal People was a smash hit ’ for a reason