Explicit sex returns to TV

Explicit sex scenes are in vogue again on TV, with new series such as True Blood — and this time women are calling the shots
By Andrew Billen

When was it that I realised that Percy Filth — as Jack Rosenthal’s sitcom The Lovers called sex around the time that television invented it — had made a return to the box?

Was it in the early minutes of Rome four years ago when Polly Walker as the voluptuous Atia energetically turned a freeman into her sex slave? Was it two years later when Californication debuted with a nun performing oral sex on David Duchovny? Or was it during this summer’s run of Desperate Romantics , a riskily unstuffy drama about the Pre-Raphaelites that required its actors, in the interests of historical authenticity, to agree to wear pubic hair wigs?

Actually, I think it was in August in Midsomer Murders. Detective Constable Jones became transfixed by an undraped model at a modelling class, and so did the camera. Objectors would have got short shrift. Within weeks Ofcom, television’s regulator, had rejected 37 complaints attracted by nudity on a Channel 4 programme called Life Class, and that went out at 12.30pm. But if Midsomer Murders, the darling of Middle England, was casually showing naked breasts before the watershed then truly had television exorcised the spirit of Mary Whitehouse.


Let me be frank. I was a child of the Sixties, which made me an adolescent of the Seventies. I may have now reached the age when I want to fast-forward sex scenes to get back to the plot, but bliss was it in that dawn to be male and pubescent. Sex was saturating the culture. Sitcoms such as The Lovers tittered about it (pre-marital sex was the joke), documentaries agonised over it, American imports such as Charlie’s Angels traded on it, but the canny British teenager knew where to find it: on native drama productions shortly after the bewitching hour of 9pm.

Sometimes the female nudity — and it was always female in those days — was more or less integral. Few upmarket viewers in 1976 thought any less of I, Claudius for its nude scenes. You would not have had to be Dennis Potter (although it actually was) to write sex into Casanova in 1971. You might even argue that ITV’s tale of family incest Bouquet of Barbed Wire, described by Clive James as “The House of Atreus transferred to Peyton Place”, demanded more nudity than it actually got — years later the columnist Richard Littlejohn confidently averred Susan Penhaligon had taken her kit off, forcing her to protest, flattered, that she hadn’t. But what of the 1972 intelligent supernatural thriller The Stone Tape? Why 80 minutes in, did a breast poke from a dressing gown worn by an actress who was not even credited?

This may have been the era of clean-up TV campaigns, but deep within the cocoon of television, Kenith Trodd, who produced some of its most memorable and sexiest plays, recalls fighting very few battles about sexual explicitness, aside from the hard case of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle in which a disabled woman was raped. He does recall receiving a note from a suit regarding Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven that read: “Please cut Eileen’s tits and all of Bob [Hoskins]’s cock.” “But I suppose what I am saying is that it came down not so much to policy as to individual quirks when dealing with sex.”

In 1989, however, a Potter series (not, after a falling out, produced by Trodd) delivered such an orgy of misogynistic sex that it provoked a rapid detumescence in television drama. Blackeyes told the story of an elderly male novelist making a lurid sexual fantasy out of his niece’s life. “His motives on Blackeyes were to speak up apologetically for all men,” Trodd recalls, “and he got it wrong. There was a discussion programme, some residue of Late Night Line-Up, after the first episode where everyone extolled it. But by the second, the feministic voices had got their act together and realised it was not friendly to them.”

Percy Filth did not suddenly cower and disappear. In 1990 A Sense of Guilt by Andrea Newman, the writer of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, required the very young actress Rudi Davies (who later left the business) to strip in front of a much older man (Trevor Eve, who did not). Two years later, The Camomile Lawn, directed by Peter Hall, featured Jennifer Ehle in a remarkably nude lovemaking scene. The same year Between the Lines, a gritty series about police corruption, rapidly earned the nickname “Between the Loins”.

It was quite a way to go out and the three series showed how sex bestrode the dramatic range: an upmarket soap, a historical saga and a piece of social realism (realism has always claimed nudity as a credential). But thereafter, there was less and less female flesh for the adolescent to admire.

Professor Jonathan Bignell, in An Introduction to Television Studies, notes that “although it had become common to discuss sexual activity in current affairs, documentary and other public service discussion genres, the dramatic representation of sexual activity had become increasingly self-censored by broadcasters as a result of the Aids crisis”. Television became as scared of sex as everyone else. The adaptor Andrew Davies earned in those years a reputation for slipping sex into the classics, but the sexual content of his Pride and Prejudice was actually confined to Colin Firth’s damp shirt. For Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth there would be no romps on a lawn, camomile or otherwise.

There was explicit sex on TV but to make sure of finding it you had to buy a satellite dish or wait for the arrival of Channel 5 and its avowed early policy of showing “films, f***ing and football”. On the main channels you were more likely to see a nude female stretched out cold on a mortician’s block than warming a bed. What that said about the period was a cause for concern all by itself. Inspired by the big screen’s hip new purveyors of violence such as Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, television thrillers from Prime Suspect and Cracker on, became increasingly bloody and explicit. Gore replaced groping.

Meanwhile, internal structures were changing in TV, leaving programme-makers with less autonomy and more bureaucracy, the management method that likes to say no. Trodd recalls that by the mid-Nineties he would go to a script meeting with the late Mark Shivas, Head of BBC Drama, and find an assistant head of drama sitting there too — “and what she was doing there was to try and second-guess and pre-guess what we were up to”.

It would, more and more, be a she. And here we reach a paradox. The first wave of women television executives frowned on their sex being exploited by middle-aged male writers. They are now in charge — and the corsets are being thrown off once more. Hilary Salmon, of the BBC, executive producer of Desperate Romantics, explains: “We are all women now and we can do what we like. We closed the male toilets on this floor! I just don’t think we have to wave flags about where we stand on these issues. There is a shared sensibility.”

Salmon believes that it is The Line of Beauty , made in 2006, that really demonstrates the change between sexual explicitness then and now. “The sex in it is very explicit and between men. We did think very carefully before showing men having sex in the park but we felt it was important to show it quite explicitly because the book and the adaptation took the view that homosexual sex was as natural as heterosexual sex.” One of four female producers on the serial, Salmon notes it was a long way from the day when as a junior programme-maker she rowed with Charles Denton, then Head of BBC Drama, over his opinion (probably correct at the time) that full-frontal female nudity was acceptable to audiences but full-frontal male was not.

So when it came to Desperate Romantics this summer, there was considerable freedom for a male writer, Peter Bowker, and a male director, Paul Gay, to produce explicit sex scenes. “We had,” Gay says, “many discussions about not wanting to make a dry, dusty period drama and to make it sexy and contemporary, fun and playful.” Far from there being no-nudity clauses in the actors’ contract, it was made clear during casting that full-frontal nudity might be required, although merkins would be provided, where necessary, to ensure pubic authenticity. The fair-share of filth policy resulted in an upmarket audience led by women.

But this autumn the surest way to see sexual explicitness is to watch imported American shows such as Californication, The Tudors and, a newcomer, True Blood, starting tomorrow on Channel 4 after its run on FX. Much more sexy than scary, its star Anna Paquin, who plays the telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse, is regularly to be seen in hot sex scenes, which are then posted on the net. After decades in which American television, fearful of the Bible Belt and advertisers’ sensibilities, was our prudish cousin, the arrival of HBO changed everything. Indeed, even the most ardent admirer of The Sopranos might wonder why quite so many scenes were established with shots of topless pole dancers at the Bada Bing. Equally, the revered men who made The Wire displayed a strong preference for nude scenes featuring top-heavy young actresses. The influence of the mores of these prestigious cult dramas on British directors should not be underestimated.

And the fact is that if they show it, we are unlikely to complain. Research for Ofcom in 2005 concluded that sexual imagery was less of a worry to viewers than explicit language and nudity, per se, was no longer a concern at all. “While there is some concern about the prevalence of sexual imagery, particularly with regard to children, many regard it as a sign of a more open and tolerant society,” it reported.

Cynicism is an issue for us all. Executives know sex reaches those elusive young viewers (look at the early nude locker-room scenes in Skins). It is also true, as Ofcom also found, that older viewers can still be upset. When I recently wrote in a television review that I would be campaigning for more sex on television, an older reader wrote to me: “I feel that I am being made a compulsory voyeur, so I tend to close my eyes until the grunting is over.”

But although I am probably nearer my correspondent’s age than the Skins demographic I disagree. It seems to me that for once television is moving in the right direction, away from gratuitous violence and towards a more relaxed, more continental and less sexist attitude to one of the most pleasurable facts of life. That naked artist’s model in Midsomer? She attracted a solitary complaint to Ofcom. Quite right too. Long live Percy Filth, I say.