Cartoon counselling

The Trouble with Love and Sex (Wednesday, BBC2) was extraordinary and quite successful. They took two couples plus one lonely single chap, recorded them talking to counsellors at Relate (formerly the Marriage Guidance Council, following the same rule by which the Royal Association for the Protection and Furtherance of Deaf Persons would become Eh?) and then turned the resulting dialogue into cartoons, so you heard their real voices but saw only drawings of people who didn’t look like them.

These days, when people will suffer almost any humiliation to get on television, I am sure they could have found folk who would eagerly have appeared on camera to talk about the most intimate details of their marriage. But it wouldn’t have worked so well. We would have made judgments on their body language, their clothing, even the moles on their faces, all of which would have detracted from the conversations. As it was, everyone looked rather sweet, like those Nick Park plasticine animals. And it was somehow more revealing than actual human faces could have managed. I wanted to shout at the Relate counsellors, telling them to lay it on the line: ‘Can’t you see, the bitch regards everything her poor, endlessly suffering husband says as a challenge to her authority. Don’t nod sympathetically, tell her to shut her yap!’

Dave, the single man, was the saddest of all, unable to approach any woman he fancied for fear of being rejected. Both his voice and his cartoon persona seemed agreeable, and you realised that his problems came from the fact that his father had tried to kill him. How does any psyche cope with that? The man who gave you life also wants to take it away! The only slightly duff note was his cartoon counsellor who sounded warm and kindly, but was wearing a green suit, a beard and silly oblong glasses, which made him look like every stereotypical shrink.