''Sex," said the arts editor. "I want sex." And with that sort of attitude, I wasn't surprised to hear she was leaving. But, at least, I thought, "2002: TV's year of sex" will not be a difficult review to write. Has there ever been a year in which the TV licence has not been the home viewer's invite to an orgy?
Having grabbed the nearest spent Radio Times, I soon became alarmed, however, at how little nooky had actually been available to old-fangled analogue viewers in mid-November. Over the whole week starting on 16 November, the only sex explicitly on offer was Channel 5's History of Self-Pleasure, ITV's fatuous Am I Good in Bed? (a two-part survey in which a series of factory workers failed to locate the clitoris on a giant vagina), the usual soft porn movie on Five on Friday, and a witching hour offering from ITV the same night called Stiletto Ghetto, "continuing the series following a group of table dancers and their agents in London".
This magazine is not usually without influence, but this was dismal. Twenty-five years ago a predecessor in my job, Julian Barnes, launched a long and distinguished campaign to get more sex on TV. Now, the year after the death of his most implacable opponent, it seemed for a moment as if Mrs Whitehouse had won.
Except the dear old bat hasn't, of course. There may not be as much dedicated programming as one might wish on a lonely night, but the fabric of broadcasting's content has, like almost everything else in our culture, become highly sexualised. In comedy, camp humour has become the orthodoxy. Gay men or camp followers such as Graham Norton are licensed to make sex central to their chat shows and, in turn, Jonathan Ross gets the courage to ask extraordinarily direct sexual questions of his guests. Blind Date is now so concerned with its contestants getting off with one another that even Cilla's presence fails to preserve the fiction that it is harmless family entertainment. On puritanical American network television, where once it was controversial to show Lucille Ball pregnant, Friends now unself-consciously builds an episode around condom failure.
Some of the resulting jokes are good and some are terrible. BBC1's Linda Green deals amusingly with a randy, assertive single female and often looks nearer the mark, as well as the knuckle, than HBO's Sex and the City, which I've concluded is not about women at all but a metaphor for male homosexual promiscuity. The happiest development of the year has been the long-awaited maturing of Simon Nye, who three years ago put masturbation at the centre of a Christmas trilogy of Men Behaving Badly, but this autumn made the stars of Wild West a respectable couple named Mary and Angela, whose lesbianism was scarcely an issue.
From The Year of the Sex Olympics on (the year was 1968, the channel BBC2), drama has always been the expeditionary force for sex on television. This year, Andrew Davies assured us that Tipping the Velvet would be "absolutely filthy", and then gave us nothing sexier than a brief shot of a leather dildo (no wonder dozens rang complaining of a breach of promise). Like all the dramas that made sex their main selling point, Tipping's alleged filthiness looked quaint and obvious. ITV's Footballers' Wives flopped because it patronised both its subject and its audience; the moment Chardonnay's breasts caught fire you knew it had breached faith with both. BBC1's Manchild was as desperate to look hip as its randy middle-aged male characters, and the announcement that the insipid Babyfather was returning "bolder, sexier, raunchier", suggested it was still addressing the wrong question: its community's virility rather than its ethnicity. Channel 4 showed Ian McEwan's Solid Geometry - the long-banned pickled penis play - but only to meet a debt of honour, like the BBC finally mounting Ian Curteis's Falklands Play.
More telling was the way sex invaded the run of the mill. Men kissed on The Bill. In Merseybeat, a female lead was raped before the watershed. On Casualty, an OAP complained her husband was demanding intercourse too frequently. After nine, you could even stumble upon sex being considered sensibly now and again. With Nat wrestling both with Brenda's mood swings and his own fatal illness, Six Feet Under on E4 has become an impressive exploration of Eros and Thanatos.
The one form that still habitually uses sex as a cheap come-on is, regrettably, the documentary. I exonerate, to a degree, Five, which is weaning itself from its three Fs heritage, but not Channel 4, which looks intent on becoming TV's dirty old man. Under its ever-so-cerebral television director Tim Gardam, this year it brought us two documentaries on sex changes (Make Me a Man and Changing Sex) plus Sex on TV, Better Sex, Sex With Your Ex, Sex BC, The Female Orgasm, and on and on. Documentary commissioning has become TV's school bike shed.
So as 2003 yawns, I proclaim a victory in the war for more sex on TV. It's time now to win the peace, which means less smut, more intelligence and, frankly, more stuff likely to turn us on. Like Paul, the joyless sex addict in BBC2's documentary Hypersex (4 December), TV has shown it can keep it up indefinitely. Priapism is not, however, normally a sign of health.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
