How To Get More Sex…

It’s easy to mock ITV. With the exceptions of Corrie and Emmerdale it screens little drama of any real quality, it hasn’t produced a decent comedy in two decades, its glut of real-life schlock and tawdry quiz shows are barrel-scrapingly awful, and at times its news coverage is so desperately tabloid it make the News Of The World look respectable.

So I promised myself I wasn’t going to ridicule this once-great institution any more. It’s not just shooting fish in a barrel… it’s like having a prize fight with Stephen Hawking where I’m allowed to use guns against him using catapults and me pushing him and his chair from the top of a very high flight of stairs the day before the scrap begins to make sure he has no chance at all. It’s that easy…

But then I chanced on a series on Thursday night entitled How To Get More Sex and my resolution crumbled.

The basic thrust (f’nar, f’nar) of the show is that the programme-makers go out on the streets to conduct various cod experiments to test out certain theories about sex and sexual attraction.

So one section features two men stood outside an expensive car with one dressed as the City gent and the other dressed as his chauffeur. Then passers-by are asked who is the most sexually attractive and various talking heads grace the screen to talk about the results.

Intercut throughout the show are cheeky snippets from various Carry On films and Brit sex comedies of the 1970s, plus other voxpop reports from similar types of experiments at speed dating groups.

It’s pretty tawdry stuff and its attempts at being informative and naughty all at the same time are depressingly tawdry. And any show that features Janet Street Porter and Edwina Currie discussing their sexual preferences is just plain wrong. Even if you happen to be Mr Street Porter or Mr Currie. Yuk!

Bizarrely it’s the sort of show that Five actually do quite well as Five would just straight ahead and feature the sex bits but ITV just make an utter arse of because it still thinks it’s a ‘serious’ channel. Instead the show should probably be called How To Get More Sex (We’ll Show Rude Bits. Honest! Please Watch Us. Help Our Ratings. Go On…)

Avoid at all costs.