30 NOVEMBER 2014 Television T
HE 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children is upon us, during which women can expect a barrage of messages about how to control their behaviour to prevent men from raping them. Men, meanwhile, are apparently going to be reminded by the government this year that they need to be “protectors”.
If the morass of useless moralising about gender roles starts to bring you down, though, you can always take a refreshing dip into Masters of Sex, screening on M-Net’s new “Edge” channel. Edge only broadcasts at night, from 6pm to 5am, “due to the age-restricted content”, which suggests a sweet belief that everyone who isn’t old enough to handle slightly edgier programming is being packed off to bed at 5.59pm.
Recently, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint from the public that condom ads shown on SABC3 should be moved to later timeslots so that they are “not likely to reach a young audience”. Surely a “young audience” is precisely the demographic most in need of condom ads?
I feel confident that Bill Masters would agree. Masters is the main character in the ambiguously titled Masters of Sex, a series which sounds as if it’s a reality show about people who are really good at fornication. But even Edge isn’t as edgy as that — they haven’t yet brought us Sex Box, for instance, a UK reality show in which couples have sex in a private box on stage and then discuss it with a counsellor in front of a studio audience.
No, Masters of Sex is a drama, based on real historical events. It tells the story of Masters and Virginia Johnson, who began pioneering work into human sexuality in 1957.
“There are libraries on how babies are born and not a single study on how babies are made,” Masters complains incredu- lously in the first episode. Of course, he didn’t have access to the internet.
Before Masters, Alfred Kinsey had brought out The Kinsey Reports into sexual behaviour. The differ ence between Masters and Kinsey, however, was that Kinsey conducted his research by carrying out interviews with people. Masters got people to have sex in front of him, in his laboratory, strapped to electrodes. And not people who knew each other, either: people that he and Johnson arbitrarily paired.
There is sex in the show, of course. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing you’d want to watch with your boss, unless your boss happens to be a research gynaecologist. It’s very far from pornographic, but what does make it titillating is the incongruity of a period drama — often tame and chaste — in which the focus is on sexuality.
In different hands this subject matter could have seemed tacky, but the writing is excellent and the acting superb. Masters is played by Michael Sheen, the extraordinarily talented Welsh actor who impersonated Tony Blair in the 2006 movie The Queen. In early episodes, it’s his co-star Lizzy Caplan who really steals the show, however, playing his sexually liberated research assistant.
Masters himself is anything but liberated, but he is a brilliant obstetrician. The series can’t be blamed for this, since it’s dealing with historical fact, but one does weary a little of these shows featuring mysterious, maverick doctors with personality flaws (see: House; The Knick). That criticism aside, what Masters of Sex brings to the small screen is something that feels genuinely original.
“We sit like prudish cavemen in the dark, riddled with shame and guilt,” laments Masters. Damn that load-shedding.