It sounds awful, but of course I’ll be watching ‘Sex Tape’

If your relationship was on the rocks, would you seek out sex therapy along with two other couples and… allow it all to be filmed for national television? Me neither. But it’s a good job that the likes of us aren’t the only people on the planet, for how, then, would we have Channel 4’s Sex Tape to look forward to? The brainchild of an Israeli-American “relationships expert”, Sex Tape is meant to offer, in the words of Becky Cadman, the Channel 4 commissioning editor, a “fly-on-the-wall look at relationships as they really happen, including the good, the bad and the ugly”.

Personally, I’m more excited about the sex than either the therapy or the inevitable rows. Or perhaps it’s more a sense of vague interest (because, let’s face it, I won’t be able to resist watching). I’m as fatigued by seeing sex on TV as the next thirtysomething woman – but at least it isn’t going to be a major downer. The therapy part, on the other hand, especially as it’s “sex therapy” is going to be a mixture of the cringy, the boring and the lurid. And the “bad and the ugly”, which presumably means fights, is going to be awful.

I’m not normally one to become socially awkward, but the one thing that makes me so is being caught in a room with a couple at war. Watching irrationality, insecurity and nastiness explode from three different couples between and during therapy sessions (and sex sessions) is going to push my tolerance for bad reality television to breaking point.

Of course, I’m not 100 per cent above the undignified pleasures of seeing couples’ “bad and ugly”. Having just been in Vancouver at one of the most moving weddings I’ve ever seen, and leaving with the distinct sense that most people, myself included, will never see even a fraction of the love I saw there, I find myself rather in the mood for scenes of romantic dissonance. I have an extraordinarily happily paired-off friend group, and a chance to glimpse the messiness of modern love will, though I hate to admit it, not be totally unwelcome.