The title of the 1970s farce No Sex Please, We're British - which I saw on an oddly chosen school outing - played on the libel that Brits were too embarrassed to have sex. How times have changed. Everyone knows we are now at it like rabbits, hence the three-part series No Sex Please, We're Teenagers, which plays on the hilarious unlikelihood of voluntarily celibate pubescence in north-west London. Any hilarity, however, ends with the title. Accompanying 12 London teenagers on their journey into chastity are some of the most humour- less documentary-makers the BBC has ever employed. The adventures of the Romance Academy, Harrow Branch, could have been a classic of observational television. Instead No Sex Please, We're Teenagers (Tuesdays, 9pm) is even more mirthless than No Sex Please, We're British, which, as my teenage self could have told you, is saying something.
I had my hopes initially. "It's a lifestyle based on Christian beliefs, but in a world awash with pro-sex messages will they keep it up?" sounded like a promising double entendre from the voice-over, but turned out to be just part of the general clumsiness of the badly filmed opening episode. Things soon became very solemn: we were told that in Harrow teenage pregnancy is up 40 per cent and sexually transmitted infections have doubled. Nationwide, a case of chlamydia is diagnosed every ten minutes. There was only one thing for it: sex must be stamped out.
The dozen 15- to 17-year-olds selected for the Romance Academy were an equally depressing lot, complaining (pretty incomprehensibly, to this victim of single-sex schooling) about having had too much sex. Jenine, 17, had lost her cherry the previous year in a toilet and didn't think that sex was "all it was cracked up to be". Chelsea, 16, recalled losing hers at 14 and the boy "screaming and shouting at me, and I should have been the one screaming and shouting". The lads were no more enthusiastic, not even Wesley, who suspected that having sex at 12 had not been as smart as it had seemed three years ago.
Salvation was being offered by two insufferably positive Christian youth workers named Rachel and Dan. Rachel, a drop-dead gorgeous blonde and "modern Christian", did some namelessly stressful job in which she "gave out emotionally", and therefore required "sacred space" in order to be "blown away" by God's love. She had preserved her virginity all the way to the altar. Dan, whose right eyebrow was plucked into a zebra-crossing motif, had been a "troubled youth" until he found the Holy Spirit (a substance he initially mistook for a drug) and became celibate. "But even though I am a Christian, I still think sex is amazing," he said - a statement undermined by his habit of referring to the act as a "whoopsy", a term previously reserved for canine incontinence.
Mysteriously impressed by these two, the nine sexually jaded volunteers and three virgins (they actually found some in Harrow) signed a pledge to abstain, and "evaluate and challenge current cultural attitudes to sex and relationships". They were soon wondering whether they were going to repent of this at leisure. Jenine was surprised to discover the pledge covered "foreplay and little things like that". Wesley had just "got a new girl", so the timing wasn't great for him either. With hormonal inevitability, Jenine and Wesley got drunk and started groping on a team-bonding weekend, a romance that might well have been consummated had not Wesley shortly afterwards been arrested, thereby making himself unavailable for the much-touted trip to America.
Here they met their real challenge. In Florida they found themselves among a teenager cult with stricter sexual mores than the Taliban. The born-again American virgins were led by Pastor Jason Goss, who defined sex "as any activity you have with the sex organ". Goss had an analogy about premarital foreplay: why step on the first step of a stair (eg, snog) unless you want to reach the top (ie, marry)? The pastor, the British kids concluded, was talking cobblers. Increasingly, it looked as if the trouble with voluntary virginity was the company you might keep.
"Experts" agreed, we were told, that saying no to sex gives teenagers control over their lives and builds confidence and self-esteem. So why, I wondered, had the programme entrusted the delivery of this good advice to two Christians whose advocacy was based not on common sense but biblical assertion? Other questions occurred: did the 500 teens who applied to join the Academy know they were also volunteering for hardline Christian indoctrination? And for how many was the real motive the prospect of TV stardom?
My suspicion is that this grim programme has been sneaked into prime time to fill a religious programming quota. The only compensation is that despite the po face it wears, at least one reality TV star has been born, in the form of the supremely vulgar Jenine, who, having dumped her jailed boyfriend, was soon leading the rebellion against Pastor Jason and his forthcoming Silver Ring chastity ceremony. At his teen service she got the giggles so badly she had to leave the church, confirming my belief that while bicycle-shed sex is uncomfortable, schoolyard irreverence is one of our finest traditions. No bullshit, please: we're British.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
