Mummy porn

What can parents do about the avalanche of pornography available to their children on tablet, phone and laptop? This question was the starting point for a documentary series that began on Wednesday — and the answer proved unexpected. Having gathered five mothers together and shown them a hair-raising selection of online filth, the programme blithely declared that the best way for these women to ‘make a change’ was ‘by making their own mum-approved porn film’, which they’d then screen for their families and friends.

If this premise struck anyone involved in Mums Make Porn (Channel 4, obviously) as at all questionable, they didn’t mention it. Instead, the programme simply went about its business of simultaneously stressing how abnormal porn is and normalising it.

The five women are, as you might expect, a mixed bunch. At the racier end of the spectrum is Anita, who enjoys watching porn herself and whose initial idea for family-friendliness was ‘triple penetration but with foreplay’. Considerably less gung-ho is Jane, a Christian feminist, who’d never seen the stuff before and gave every impression of wishing she hadn’t seen it now. (‘Close-up shots of genitalia? Why?’) The other three are somewhere in the middle, with Sarah Louise presumably speaking for many parents when she said that she doesn’t want her children to think fivesomes are a common human activity.

At this point, the film they’ll write, direct and produce is at the research and development stage — although it seems unlikely that Sarah Louise will achieve her dream casting of Gary Lineker as the male lead. While still encouraged to keep up with online videos, the women were sent to some British porn sets to see how the professionals do it — which in one case was intermittently.