Friday 12th September 2003 – Who’s The Nation of Sick Perverts Now?

Because we live in a particularly backward part of Surrey, we are unable to receive Channel 5. This makes browsing the TV listings a bittersweet experience. It's hard to enjoy the ITV News at 10, when you know that you could be watching ‘G-String Divas’ or ‘Porn: A Family Business’ over on 5.

All the same, I think I have a fair idea what it is like. I was in Birmingham for the short-lived but glorious reign of Live! TV, Kelvin McKenzie's ill-advised foray into the world of broadcasting. Live! TV's biggest star was News Bunny; a man in a shabby rabbit costume who popped up all over the channel, most notably on (obviously) the news. He would stand behind the newsreader - who would inevitably be perched on the edge of the desk, in the modern style - and comment on the stories using the power of mime. It was fun to see News Bunny punching the air as the news reader reported England's latest success in the football, or to see him holding his sides and rocking with exaggerated laughter at some light-hearted dog-bites-man story. On the other hand, he could be a distracting presence, shaking his head ruefully at reports of famine in Africa, or wiping pantomime tears away from his eyes at news of another American high-school massacre. At moments like this, the presence of News Bunny seemed almost inappropriate.

Of course, Live! TV, like Channel 5, was famed for being more risqué than the other terrestrial channels. As well as the conventional soft-porn films, Live! pushed the envelope with low-rent, jaw-droppingly seedy programmes like Private Dancer (a semi-naked lady dances for your pleasure) and Painted Ladies (semi-naked ladies cover themselves in paint and role all over the floor and walls of a white room). Pretty sleazy.

I have an English friend who now lives in America (he is a famous bowling champion, you may have heard of him), and we were talking (e-mailing) not long ago about the countries’ differing attitudes toward sex. He was saying how the general prurience and anxiety about sex in America makes him feel more European than he ever has done before. We Brits are so used to being made to feel like the cold fish next to our lusty, uninhibited Latin neighbours, it must be novel to move to a country that has an even more unhealthy attitude toward sex than we do.

Or does it? The trouble with America is that it is a country that we feel absolutely comfortable defining and sitting in judgement on, but it is so huge and diverse that it defies easy generalisations of any sort. Certainly articles like this from Monday’s Guardian, which reports the fact that the Bush administration is spending twice as much on programmes that promote sexual abstinence to under-18s than on programs that teach about safe sex, don’t do anything to dispel the notion of a country of pale, god-fearing folk, strapping down their dirty-pillows and screwing on their chastity belts.

Plus, much American TV output reflects these attitudes, serving up trite morality tales in which teenage girls who allow their flat-headed jock boyfriends to ‘get to third base’ inevitably end up having a chastening pregnancy scare and learning their lesson before the end credits roll. In Britain, we proudly compare this to our regular Sunday night fare of gritty, council-flat sex dramas and ‘bodice-ripping’ literary adaptations, and pat ourselves on the back for being so much more open-minded than our American cousins.

But then you look at a program like Sex and The City, and you wonder who the prudes really are. As nauseatingly aspirational and tiresomely retrograde as it might be, there is no doubt that Sex and The City seems to have a pretty balanced attitude toward sex. It is famed for being the most explicit TV series ever, but in truth the thing that makes it stand out is its attitude toward sex, rather than what it shows on screen. The characters in SATC have sex as part of their daily lives. They have sex, have fun, and get on with things. It’s telling that this is what makes the show ‘shocking’ over here.

We may have a rich tradition of celluloid shagging, but sex on British TV is invariably ‘gritty’ or ‘brutal’ or ‘desperate’. It is always ‘integral to the storyline’, for which read ‘a miserable and joyless precursor of doom’. Characters who have sex are usually having an affair, or possibly going through a midlife crisis, or going off the rails in some other way. They are always transgressing, and it is understood that their sexuality reflects their transgression, and that they will ultimately pay for it. Sex is destructive.

When you think of it this way, it makes the continental European idea of England as a nation of erotophobes easier to square. The only way the media can confront sex is as out-and-out sleaze, or with a miserable Victorian moral brickbat. And I imagine that only a very few of us are not in some way influenced by this element of our culture.

Certainly not me. My most embarrassing moment came on a long-haul flight to Tokyo last year. I decided to watch the (American) film ‘Monster’s Ball’ on my little personal TV screen, knowing only a little bit about it – that it was the film that won Halle Berry her Oscar and that it featured a cameo by Sean ‘Puff ‘P Diddy’ Daddy’ Combs and excellent rapper Mos Def.

By 30 minutes in, it had become something of a slog – a turgid, worthy Film-with-a-big-F, with the actors competing in a who-can-do-the-drawliest-Southern-accent competition (Billy Bob Thornton won). When the lights were turned down on the plane, I resigned myself to the fact that I would soon be snoring away, blood clots forming with silent inevitability in my calves.

This was until the screen in front of me suddenly erupted into the longest, sweatiest, brightest sex scene I have ever witnessed. I looked around and realised that, in the dark, I could see what everyone around me was watching with perfect clarity, each screen lit up in the murk like a Christmas tree. I waited anxiously for the harshly lit rutting to stop. It didn’t. It went on and on and on and on and on. I sank into my seat, the horrible realisation that dozens of people around me could see the blistering porn action unfolding on my screen forcing me lower and lower still. “The dirty bastard,” they were thinking; “doesn’t he know we can all see his shame?”

I pulled up my collar, pressed my index fingers into my temples and waited for the shagging to cease. And still it didn’t. Then I felt a finger gently nudging my shoulder, and I looked up to see a smiling, demure Japanese face looking down at me. “Ice cream?”

(In fact, she actually said something like “Ice-ah creamo?”, and I was going to write that, but it looked a bit ‘Me so solly!’ on the page, so I didn’t. Ah, but I just have…so….anyway). In the end, I realised that I needn’t have worried. The stewardess and the Japanese people around me probably weren’t appalled at my obvious addiction to porn. A week in Tokyo led me to realise that Britain’s relationship with sex is positively straightforward compared to Japan’s. This is a culture firmly based on tenets of respect and social propriety, and yet is so suffused with porn, and so tightly in the grip of a disturbing sexual obsession with schoolgirls, it boggled my simple English mind.

After a week of alternately averting my eyes from massive neon images of naked pre-teens, and drunkenly leafing through the bizarre cartoon-smut that sits at eye-level in every newsagents, I almost felt relieved to return to the stifling erotophobia of England.