Television
Just when it looked as though Channel 4's drama department had found its feet with Psychos, along comes Love in the 21st Century to topple it on to its back once again. Channel 4's relationship with sex is a lot less interesting than papers such as the Daily Mail think. Perversion and prostitution have had their hours in the moonlight, but it is the gratuitous female nudity of hey-ho serials such as The Camomile Lawn that one remembers most fondly.
Love in, a series of six half-hour plays on Wednesday nights, comes in this tradition of pointless titillation, although the first two have proved more gong than dinner: this week's, for instance, was called "Threesomes", but there was no troilism near it, and I doubt we'll get our money-shot's worth from Natasha Little's forthcoming episode, "Masturbation", either.
These frank, one-word subtitles (week one's was "Reproduction") take on the euphemism of "love" in the main, but they are about the only sign of sinew. Otherwise the stories slavishly follow bad precedents: the jaunty incidental music of 1950s shorts, the larky voice-overs of the British sex comedy from Alfie on and the twist in the tail you can see a mile off, copyrighted by Anglia's Tales of the Unexpected.
Paul Abbott's "Reproduction" was a Wacky Races of hairpin plot bends about a 30-year-old woman whose biological clock goes off just as its owner is going off men. A woman who seduces blokes for their sperm is an urban myth nobody here could be bothered to embellish. You'd call Abbott's characterisation cartoonish were that not to insult The Simpsons and King of the Hill (and possibly Wacky Races). Fay, played by Catherine McCormack, as Julie Walters' younger sister, works in a Manchester chip shop, so of course when she lands a doctor she must go to bits and fall in love. The twist in the penis is that he is (or is he?) infertile.
In this week's story, a doctor was also the prize catch for best friends Louise and Kate. Feisty Louise (Marsha Thomason) meets him at a sleep deprivation clinic, which is some sort of joke, because when sly Kate (Kate Ashfield) seduces him, it is a nasty case of sleepless nights all round. When they confront Dr Charlie (blankly realised by Oliver Milburn), he breaks into giggles, and we are meant to take the hint that he is, or represents, the squirt whom the girls laughed at in the school playground years ago.
This series' brief is to present stories about love from "the female perspective". Aside from the obvious quibble about having someone called Paul write one of them, Love in honours this pledge in the most reactionary and predictable way: sexist cliche meeting sexist cliche, like Mills meeting Boon. If fables about predatory women who scrap among themselves over professional men is writing from a female perspective, then give me old-fashioned misogyny any day. Perhaps, in fact, this is old-fashioned misogyny.
Remarkably, The Sexual Century (Mondays, ITV), which on the listings pages just looks like this week's cynical contribution towards ITV's factual quota, was sober and informed social history - or was until the last ten minutes, when we saw rather too much of a gushing American sex surrogate called Vena ("It's like a calling for me"). In the previous 50 minutes we learnt so much so quickly about the sexologists of the past 100 years, that the script could be a text for trainee precis-writers. Unfortunately its efficiency left us in a state of chronic coitus interruptus: just as things were getting interesting, teacher would move on. For the slower members of the class, nothing was allowed to go unillustrated; thus old-time phones were shown being answered to illustrate the relatively clear idea that "everyone was talking about" Marie Stopes's Married Love. Somehow it came as no surprise to learn that the co-producers were all Canadians: The Sexual Century was made almost in the vernacular of British television, but not quite.
The show's unspoken conclusion was that while masturbation may be harmless, writing about it sends you crackers. Stopes, said her biographer, was a monster to her husbands. Wilhelm Reich was jailed after claiming his wooden box could harness the natural force of the orgasm. Alfred Kinsey, originally a look-but-don't-touch statistician, ended his days cruising Rome with his protege, Kenneth Anger. Masters and Johnson, after much distinguished work calming down premature ejaculators, excitedly announced a "cure" for homosexuality and reported that kissing could pass on Aids.
In an odd way, The Sexual Century and Love in the 21st Century would have been better if made for each other's networks. Love in would have blossomed into a series of 60-minute dramas reflecting contemporary life, rather than tall tales told by a nymphomaniac. The Sexual Century, meanwhile, would have been accompanied by a commentary that did not blush and go all serious every time it came across something it thought it heard the boys at the back of the room sniggering at.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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