Three couples having sex in a shed? What an anticlimax . . .
UnFoRTUnATELy, telly’s got a one-track mind t hi s week. Maybe it’s the unseasonally warm weather but wherever you look, everyone’s at it on-screen.
Tonight sees Michael Sheen as American sexuality researcher Dr William Masters, in Masters of Sex on Channel 4. Tomorrow, Channel 5, home of Celebrity Big Brother, will attempt to outdo itself with its tackiest programme ever, Fat For Cash, a wodge of voyeurism about 30st sex workers.
on Thursday, actor jack Davenport plays a womanising gynaecologist in the Sixties hospital drama Breathless, billed as a British version of Mad Men with looser morals.
This marathon got off to a pathetic start last night with Sex Box (C4), in which three couples copulated in a sealed, sound- proofed box in the studio.
Everything about Sex Box was badly devised. Agony aunt Mariella Frostrup got all girly and giggly with the couples before sending them into the shed; the studio audience twiddled their thumbs while a trio of sexologists explained that the British don’t usually like talking about you-knowwhat; and then the couple emerged, and everyone got embarrassed.
To be fair, the first guinea-pigs, 21year- old exhibitionists Dean and Rachel, would probably have been just as happy without the box.
The Peeping Tom sexologists were much more bashful. They established that Rachel and Dean had ‘got straight down to it’ — and that was quite enough detail, thank you.
The whole programme was pointlessly coy, euphemistic and inarticulate. It was like going to your GP and mumbling that you’ve got a bit of a funny pain here-ish, to be told: ‘yes, well, spare me the gruesome descriptions. Here’s an aspirin.’
The second couple, gay men named john and Matt, looked thoroughly uncomfortable. john parried all the questions with jokes — ‘Sex is a treat, like cake,’ he said. ‘you wouldn’t want to have it every day.’
The third pair, fortysomethings Des and Lynette, got up to ‘a variety of things which we’d like to keep private’. Thank heavens for that.
Despite C4’s lascivious hype, there were no cameras in the box. So viewers didn’t know what actually happened in this seedy boudoir — which gave the proceedings a sense of anticlimax rather than intimacy.
Was there a four-poster? A feather mattress? A water bed? Soft lighting and slinky music? A kettle? We can only pray there was a side door for a housemaid, because we didn’t see anyone going in to change the sheets between couplings.
Dirty linen is a basic error, but nowhere near as heinous as the mistake perpetrated by Lucy Worsley in A Very British Murder (BBC4). Dis- cussing the Golden Age of detective fiction in the Twenties, she started to sing the praises of Agatha Christie’s greatest novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
She read a spine-tingling passage, in which the body is discovered with a dagger in its neck. Anyone who has read the tale would have recognised a couple of Christie’s ingenious clues. And then Worsley ruined it, utterly spoiled it for anyone who doesn’t know the book, by spelling out the clues and revealing the ending.
That’s unforgivable. It’s like vandalising a painting or stamping on a Stradivarius. Thousands of potential Christie readers watching last night have had a pleasure wrecked for them. The night I read Roger Ackroyd, 20 years ago, the ending shocked me so much I couldn’t sleep. The book is quite brilliant. And with a smidgin of ingenuity, Worsley could have preserved its mystery.
It’s a shame, because this series otherwise has been great fun. Dr Worsley relates crime stories with gusto, relishing the sordid details: last night she made the 100-yearold Crippen case sound like a modern murder hunt.
Edwardian press barons used to urge their editors to report a new murder every day, she revealed, and there’s room for that on television — a ten-minute Worsley tale of betrayal and bloodshed from history, screened perhaps at midnight each night.
just don’t give away the endings of novels.