From Benny Hill to Normal People: a brief history of sex on British TV

Long gone are the days when post-watershed schedules were littered with smut – we are now in the neurotic age of the intimacy co-ordinator

Paul Mescal, star of sexed-up TV series Normal People, has opened up about sex on TV. Recent research from UCLA that showed that young people believe that there is too much sex on television, Mescal has hit back, saying sex on screen is “massively important … if we remove it, to make younger people comfortable, we’d be doing everybody a disservice.”
The idea that Gen Z is prudish and turning off sex scenes on TV out of moral disapproval is not quite right. 
It is true that, in the UK,  terrestrial TV is a little more coy than it was in the 1990s and 2000s, and that mainstream BBC One and ITV1 dramas don’t have the same degree of titillation that they once had (I doubt a show like Between the Sheets with its plotlines of OAP sex and latent erotic awakenings would get commissioned now). But there is still a lot of sex – including teenagers at it like, well, teenagers – elsewhere on TV. While American network television is chaste, HBO’s very successful Euphoria is a never-ending bonk-a-thon (for the older reader, imagine Tucker’s Luck with nudity). It can also go to some pretty disturbing places (think of Michaela Coel’s award-winning I May Destroy You). 
Nevertheless, the days have long gone when post-watershed schedules were littered with late-night smut that kept teenage boys awake with their hand on the remote control ready to change channels if their mum came in; Nice Work, Portrait of A Marriage, Eurotrash (which regularly showed pornographic scenes from the continent). We have forgotten that Channel 5 in its early days was, after sundown, a positive hotbed of imported ‘erotic thrillers’. The increased availability of porn online is surely a factor here. When you are only a couple of clicks away from seeing everything on display, where is the incentive to watch hoping for a brief glimpse of nipple? 
To understand the current situation of sex on TV we need to look back over its history. The pace of social and cultural change in the 1960s still seems dizzying,  even for those of us who weren’t born, or barely born then. It must have seemed vertiginous to live through a decade that began with Michael Holliday crooning “Why am I so starry-eyed?” and ended with Mick Jagger declaring that ‘rape, murder, it’s just a shot away’. And TV was quick to embrace, or at least question, the new permissiveness. By the end of the decade, Nigel Kneale had lampooned the excesses of counterculture with his dystopian play – The Year of the Sex Olympics.
I would suggest that we have been living through a similar era of rapid change – possibly even bigger change. The internet has changed TV and our society – sometimes, it feels, out of all recognition. This is particularly true of sex on TV. Was there ever that much until comparatively recently? Look back at the programming of the 20th century for the raunch and spice that is remembered and you’ll be surprised. 
Using the BBC’s very handy Genome website I just rifled through their schedule for this week exactly 50 years ago. On BBC One, in prime time, there is a documentary about oil refining in the Shetlands, a recital of Chopin etudes, Panorama. There are standard episodes of police plodders Z Cars and Softly Softly. Top Of The Pops aside, the only things I can find in the whole week that speak to our historical memory of the sexy 70s is a possibly slightly spicy Play For Today about the awakening ‘feelings’ of a young woman on a Yorkshire farm. I would dare to suggest that nobody was crouched in front of that with their tongue hanging out.
ITV was hotter, yes, but not by much. Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV campaign raged against the bums ‘n’ willies comedy of Benny Hill, but her target seemed more often to be the less-watched top-drawer stuff – Dennis Potter, with his dark and deeply sexual approach was very often the subject of her ire, to the extent that the BBC withdrew his play Brimstone And Treacle in 1976, with its then Director of Programmes Alasdair Milne dubbing it “nauseating”. It remains a very tough watch, and it’s inconceivable that it could be made today, featuring as it does the rape of a young disabled woman by the Devil that seemingly ‘cures’ her. But these extremes were very few and far between. 
The battle of sex on TV became characterised between traditional values – Whitehouse was a hardline Christian social conservative – and liberalism (represented, to some degree, by the people who were making television drama). Whitehouse didn’t help her cause by going after fripperies – Chuck Berry’s ‘My Ding A Ling’ or a sanguineous vegetable on Doctor Who – which made her look ridiculously prim. Her prediction that society would gradually become more cheaply sexualised and meaningless looks very different in the 2020s, now it’s come true (though she got the medium that did it wrong – it was the internet, not TV). 
During the 1980s, the Thatcher government just wasn’t very interested in sex on TV. Their beef was with current affairs – Death On The Rock, for example. TV makers carried on doing their own thing, injecting lashings of sex into dramas such as The Life and Loves of a She Devil, an adaptation of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. Only Patrick Malahide’s buttocks in the latter caused much consternation publicly. 
Inevitably, as time went on, more was needed to keep viewers’ interest – a literal race to the bottom. TV caught up with cinema in the 1990s. Dramas such as The Men’s Room with Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy could easily rival big screen hits such as Basic Instinct for explicit scenes.  And then there was the Blair government’s relaxing of the rules on censorship and porn which made the following decade a sort of orgiastic free-for-all, complete with viral sex-adjacent moments, some of which were propelled by the boom in reality TV – note Big Brother contestant Kinga’s experience with a wine bottle. 
But ultimately it was the arrival of streaming and social media that changed everything, and changed everything so fast that we didn’t even notice it. In our current age, there is so much ‘content’ – each piece of it watched by so few people – that almost nothing sticks in a big way. [Yet conversely, social media ensures that certain intimate scenes DO touch a nerve, or at least perpetuate a conversation]. TV is now virtually a different medium, fulfilling a different function. So there can be a show like Naked Education, where kids stare at adults’ naked bodies, and apparently that’s wholesome and progressive fare, and nobody much notices. Sexual shock tactics get ever more desperate and toddlerish; hit film Saltburn, currently on Amazon Prime, is basically American Pie for people who have a 2:2 in Psychology from Loughborough. 
My sense is that while there is a new chasteness in mainstream TV, the cheesy sex scene, featuring some saxophone music and tasteful lighting – what we might call the Howards’ Way school of erotica – is now unacceptable. The best depictions of sex on modern TV strive in some way to acknowledge the truth of the current, post-MeToo angst minefield around the whole damn thing – literal physical awkwardness in the case of Mescal’s Normal People. 
Despite this search for truth, we are now in the age of the intimacy co-ordinator where sex scenes are discussed to the nth degree before the cameras roll. This seems to go against the desired authenticity. Surely nothing is more fake – or indeed less sexy – than being coordinated and filling in forms? 
But it’s ironic that we live now in a culture where sex is so neurotic and problematic. Wasn’t all that greater openness on TV meant to solve our hang-ups?