Julie Burchill

The naked truth about sex on TV

It's been such a long, strange ride

  • From Spectator Life
Jonathan Bailey as Anthony in Bridgerton [Liam Daniel/Netflix]

What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d have told the teenage me that in my lifetime I’d see a comedian with breasts playing a piano with a penis on television, I’d have very much approved; having seen Jordan Gray do so on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live last year, I wish I hadn’t.

Sex on TV has been such a long, strange ride. There were always ‘blue movies’ for those who didn’t mind taking a walk on the seedy side, but most channels were well aware than TV was akin to a guest in the home – and no one wanted to be accused of being the dirty beast who didn’t flush, polluting the pristine hearth. With the sexual revolution of the 1960s, newspapers would often warn of ‘full frontal’ nudity approaching – but there would always be a carefully-placed vase or poncho.

Frank Finlay in 1971’s Casanova and Prunella Gee in 1973’s Shabby Tiger were the Adam and Eve of primetime full-frontal and from then on, the small screen was Liberty Hall. Even mums became sophisticates: ‘We were watching Rock Follies, not nudity but it was “out there”, and I remember my mother remarking on a Julie Covington bed scene “Why doesn’t she just take it all off?”’, says a friend.

By the time we got to the 1980s, we were up to our ears in breasts; we’d seen serious ones (Play for Today), posh ones (The Camomile Lawn) and even vampire ones (Hammer House of Horror – fangs for the mammaries). This was the beginning of the flasher’s friend Channel 4 – or ‘Channel SWORE’ as a tabloid childishly called them – and sometimes a little red triangle appeared on a top corner of the screen to denote risqué content, leading teenage boys to stay up watching some art film until dawn only to discover two donkeys cracking on.

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