Sex and the Sitcom

This programme contains some strong language.

For 50 years, sex has defined the British sitcom, as much by its absence as its presence.

People who have good sex lives aren't comedy writers.

For 50 years, sitcom man has loved, lusted and usually lost out.

We could see the depiction of sex in the British sitcom as highly tragic throughout,

and yet we're happy to laugh about that.

So, how has sitcom reflected Britain's changing sexual mores?

Nowadays, there seems to be very little limit

as to how far you can go.

How has sitcom woman responded to the sexual revolution?

She wanted more excitement in her life,

which she didn't really get from her husband.

She took what she wanted, when she wanted it. She just wants men.

Have we finally conquered our inhibitions?

Or will our attitude to sex always be laughable?

Cor!

This programme contains some strong language.

The heroes of British sitcom come in all shapes and sizes,

but we've had more loveable losers than Lotharios,

more mummies' boys than ladies' men.

I've learned a lot about sex from sitcoms.

I've learned that it's wrong,

I've learned that it's grubby

and that it's not going to happen to you.

This is a journey into frustration.

Censorship and scheduling have helped emasculate sitcom man,

but the malaise runs deeper,

to the heart of our comic sensibility

and to the birth of the genre.

In Britain, when we finally cracked sitcom in '56

with Hancock's Half Hour,

what you're looking at is a comedy of desperation, really.

We dealt with losers,

we dealt with people whose lives were flawed.

I think it was the same with their sex lives - their sex lives were flawed.

So the comedy came out of them not getting any sex,

not getting any action.

-Have you ever been married?

-No.

-Engaged?

-No.

-Regular girlfriends?

-No.

-Casual girlfriends?

No.

-Do you like women?

-Yes.

The scene in The Ladies Man

where he's being asked for a description of himself

and he's reeling off all these terrible qualities.

That sums up what Hancock was like

and that sums up the type of character that we've had in sitcoms

over the last few decades.

Can you interest women conversationally?

No.

Can you amuse them?

No.

Captain Mainwaring, or Basil Fawlty, or David Brent,

they're all flawed, imperfect human beings

and you wonder if they can form a relationship.

-Do they laugh at you?

-Yes!

-In which way?

-In the worst possible way!

And the more things changed,

the more things stayed the same.

The Swinging Sixties were a time of liberation,

experimentation and free love...

but not on Sitcom Street.

It is fashionable to regard the '60s

as a period when, quote, "It all hung out",

which always sounds dreadfully uncomfortable to me!

But, actually, I think it takes the better part of the decade

to trickle down to people who are not living in metropolitan London,

who don't have jobs of choice, who aren't uniquely beautiful.

Just because a bloke in West London

is having sex with his hippy girlfriend and smoking dope

doesn't mean someone at TV Centre is going to slap this on our screens.

Things move slowly - or they did then.

Mostly, comedy deals with suburban life more than urban life.

There was a show called Meet The Wife

with Thora Hird and Freddie Frinton.

A northern couple, entirely benign.

Sex, I don't think, was even alluded to in any way, shape or form,

let alone shown and/or done.

Occasionally it's called "it", I seem to remember.

-Here's your cocoa.

-Oh, thanks, Freddie.

Or there was a show called All Gas And Gaiters...

Four men in a bishopric, as it were.

Sex, as far as I remember, is never alluded to,

except as a kind of, "It's a temptation and I must avoid it".

In fact, a battle was raging for the very soul of television.

We saw a programme that started at 6.35

and it was the dirtiest programme

that I have seen for a very long time.

But, for now, sitcom sat on the sidelines.

The more serious dramas, the Armchair Theatres, the Wednesday Plays -

sex is part and parcel of the subjects they tackled.

But sitcom is always considered to be more family orientated,

it's more about getting the people together to watch it.

Most comedies played early evening for a family audience

and that was who you were appealing to.

The late night satire shows

could afford to take more risks,

but even here the "it" word dare not speak its name.

I started with That Was The Week That Was

and I did a sketch in which Lance Percival was the driver

and Millicent Martin was the engine of the car

and everything was a sexual innuendo.

Change gear.

Horn.

HORN HONKS

Oh, I like that!

Innuendo would be sitcom's shorthand for sex

for the next 20 years.

I'm not sure why we, as a nation,

like innuendo so much.

For me, there's a sort of familiarity with it.

There's this sort of comfort blanket feeling to it

that reminds me of the Carry On films

and the comedies that I loved, growing up.

Try another double bend!

Kinky...

People from other countries

see innuendo as something that the British do all the time,

on television and in film, in a sitcom,

but also just in everyday lives.

It's one of the ways in which we talk.

-I'm not stopping.

-What are you doing?

-Reversing.

-Pervert!

But in 1965,

one writer did engage directly with the sexual revolution

and put sitcom on the front line.

Till Death Us Do Part is perhaps the first adult sitcom.

Johnny Speight's scripts looked at politics,

perhaps immigration and, inevitably, sex.

I think the people who complain about sex are the ones who aren't getting enough.

The ones who are getting their share have no complaints,

quite satisfied, well happy.

Till Death Us Do Part addressed the growing generation gap

in our attitudes to sex.

Alf Garnett has this daughter who's young and hip and swinging,

he has the randy Scouse git.

From the writer's point of view,

over there, young people are living a fantastic sexual life.

We was decent brought up, we was, me and your mum.

I mean I never... Well...

In an episode entitled Sex Before Marriage,

the older Garnetts come out foursquare

against sex before marriage,

thinking it should be something that should only be kept within the marriage vows.

I mean, I never attempted to touch your mother...

until after we was married.

WELL after.

Alf Garnett, I don't think he gets his share of sex scenes at all.

Actually, I would love to be able to do a show with him in bed

trying to have it away with the missus.

That could be hysterical, I think, very funny.

Look, you want to read something, sonny.

You want to read something a bit edifying,

-something a bit educative.

-Educative?

By making Alf a spokesman for Britain's moral majority,

Speight subverted sitcom's conservatism.

Mrs Whitehouse, innit?

Mrs Mary Whitehouse!

Say, a programme like Till Death Us Do Part...

Brilliantly funny, brilliantly written.

But you see, he was the one that stood for moral values,

but he was the one

people were supposed to feel a great dislike for.

That woman is concerned

for the moral welfare of your country, isn't she?

The moral fibre that's being rotted away by your corrupt television.

But the advances of the '60s could no longer be ignored,

and one advance in particular...

The day is printed by the side of every pill,

and providing she can remember what day it is,

a woman can be sure whether or not she has taken today's pill.

I think the impact of the pill was

that for the first time in your life as a woman,

if you were taking it regularly and weren't one of the minority

who had a terrible time with it,

you actually had unalloyed pleasure without guilt.

And I happen to think that was very important.

The pill would change the dynamic of sitcom relationships forever.

British sitcoms before the advent of the pill,

are entirely male-centric.

The male character is the lead key,

women are right at the edge.

They're people who tell him what to do, they're objects of lust,

but we see it entirely from his point of view. It's always him.

You can see things changing towards the end of the '60s and early '70s.

It's Awfully Bad For Your Eyes, Darling

is a show which puts women together in a flat-share.

These women seem more adult with their attitudes towards sex.

It is the permissive age and this is one of the first shows to exploit that freedom.

The librarian wishes to remind you that the following books are now overdue.

Portnoy's Complaint, Lady Chatterley's Lover,

The Sensuous Woman and The Kinsey Report.

I remember that last one.

It said that married couples do it 2.8 times a week.

I wonder what they do on the 0.8 occasion?

'It's Awfully Bad For Your Eyes, Darling was co-written by Jilly Cooper.

'Joanna Lumley is one of the stars and she's exploited'

by wearing very few clothes throughout the entire surviving episode,

which I think is something they did on purpose.

How do you do?

How do you do?

Would you like to see something else?

-Something else?

-Well, I could show you if you liked.

-Yes...

'Perhaps they just wanted to show these women were less self-conscious'

and perhaps were at home with the attractiveness of their body.

As the pill and sexual liberation free women up

to take control of making stuff and doing stuff, women are going,

"We'll make the TV programmes and this is what's funny."

What have you got there?

-Sex in the Sev...

-Sssh!

Sex In The '70s.

Trust you!

Liver Birds was a bit risque, they thought.

Sometimes I tried to be risque.

Go on, phone him.

After all, you've got nothing to lose.

You cheeky cow!

'There were sexual references'

and we did have lots of boyfriends,

but you couldn't really go into it in detail

or we'd be a couple of slags, wouldn't we, you know?

I did enjoy the steak.

I did enjoy the wine...

They were naughty girls who lead men on

and then, you know... don't give them satisfaction.

So, what's for afters?

I mean, no! No, Aubrey, we hardly know each other!

It did have an innocence about it, which I wouldn't write now

because it doesn't exist, either in me or the world.

But there was an innocence in the world, then.

But by the early '70s,

innocence was under attack

and the pace of change bewildering.

Have we become a more civilized society with less hypocrisy, intolerance and repressiveness?

Or have we become less civilized,

with moral standards undermined and young people confused?

-Beryl, we live in a permissive society.

-Not on this street, we don't!

-Everybody's at it!

-Not with me, they're not.

Sex, detached from its purpose, which is procreation,

and its condition, which is love,

is a very horrible thing.

-All girls are supposed to be crying out for it!

-Not this one, Geoffrey. I'm the silent majority.

I don't believe that sex should be restricted entirely to procreation.

Sex is one of the few pleasures...

that practically everyone can indulge in.

If Britain was confused, so too were its sitcoms.

The Permissive Society has its tentacles into comedy

so that characters used the Swinging Sixties

or the permissive society as a sort of excuse

in trying to court a girl, or the other way round.

As a sort of, "Oh, come on. We're allowed to do this stuff now."

It's only manners, Beryl.

Total strangers do it now instead of shaking hands!

The Permissive Society was now a hot topic

in the most traditional sitcoms.

What are you talking about?

You don't think I'm looking forward to this orgy tonight, do you?

You have talked about nothing else for the past fortnight.

I've been trying to convince myself.

Oh, Terry!

You arranged it - you and Bernie.

Enid and I would rather that you took us to the pictures.

You have been stocking up the drinks cupboard all week,

you have filled the house with cheese straws!

But our response to the sexual revolution

got tangled up in sitcom's other obsession - social class.

We've got company.

Have we? Who?

Joyce and Edna, they're coming with us. Sort of training.

They're thinking of issuing them with new equipment.

I don't see why. Their old equipment looks good enough to me!

While the permissive society was agonized over in the suburbs,

over on ITV, blokes were just getting on with "it".

For some reason ITV was much more interested in shagging and nooky,

whereas the BBC wasn't. The BBC didn't like to talk about it.

But ITV, probably because it had a more working-class demographic,

found it funnier.

The inside of the bus is my pitch, you've got the cab!

What could I do inside a cab?

Well, use your imagination!

Phwoar!

1970s shows like On The Buses, like The Dustmen,

all these shows were unashamedly

about men who liked drinking and having it off.

But the permissive society was middle class.

It was Alan Bennett and Malcolm Bradbury writing about lecturers committing adultery

and smoking pipes at the same time.

You could only have sex with a woman if you'd read the Guardian,

whereas on ITV you could only have sex with a woman if you'd eaten some chips.

But when sex finally arrived in the suburbs...

Bye, darling.

..it caused a scandal.

In most sitcoms the guy is a loser.

If he's trying to get a woman he probably doesn't succeed, because that's where the comedy is.

But then when you take a Lothario head-on,

when you take someone who's got a recognizable, successful thing -

as they did with Leslie Phillips in Casanova '73 -

this was actually a new departure.

He had a slight eye for the girls, if you know what I mean.

I wouldn't have thought he was a libertine, exactly.

He was a bit naughty...

But no naughtier than most men I know!

Here you've got someone who's a suave talker, who cheats on his wife all the time,

who tries to have affairs with every woman going.

It often gets him into bigger trouble,

but what it was showing was someone that was quite comfortable with sex.

We'll see what happens at the interview.

How about tonight, six o'clock?

Is six o'clock all right for you?

Well, no, not at the office. No, no.

Do you happen to know The Ding-a-Ling Club?

It was as much the fault of the ladies he picked up as his,

because they picked him up as well,

but they didn't worry about that side.

I've always heard about you. All the women you've had -

I used to lean over the banisters and hear them talk.

The biggest lecher in Esher.

Am I really?

Now it would probably be the wife who's having the affairs

and the husband trying to sort it out.

Please. I'll be eternally grateful to you. Please!

Well, if I can help somebody as I pass along...

'Casanova '73 broke the first commandment of sitcom -

'thou shall not shag.'

Here beginneth the first lesson.

It lost its prime-time slot after just three episodes.

There was a particular woman who used to shout and scream.

Mary Whitehouse, that was it.

She used to scream if anything was remotely naughty.

I think shows like Casanova '73 become controversial

simply because people aren't used to that openness about sex.

Television's taken a long time to get there.

It was just the wrong time,

when they had rules that they no longer have now.

Now, please, look, Tessa...

Ooh, I've got the cramp. Ooh!

'I suppose we've all grown up, or something, I don't know.'

But nowadays, there seems to be very little limit

as to how far you can go.

But for now, sitcom had learnt its lesson,

retreating into the world of the double entendre,

where nothing was quite what it seemed.

If you liked innuendo,

the '70s sitcom would give you one.

Let me proffer you a little dinky-donks.

-Oh, no...

-Dinky-dinky doo-dah! Come along.

Oh, all right then, if it will give you pleasure.

Yeah, that's the general idea.

Writing for Frankie Howerd, you sort of had to write it the way that he wanted it

and I could only do it out loud, funnily enough, which could cause great embarrassments to my family.

So I once went out and was doing it on the common outside my house

where three policemen came up to me and thought I was a lunatic.

"Ode to Ambrosia.

"I love to kiss her golden hair

"She sets me writing ditties..."

Get ready, get ready!

He had a very, very unique sense of humour

that was, at its heart, suggestive.

"But most of all I love to roam

"Around her ample...

"country estate."

Up Pompeii was very formative for me,

cos it was just very freewheeling

and although it was, I gather, tightly scripted

and incredibly controlled, in fact,

it looked like a bit of a cabaret, in which cleavaged women bounced around

and then bounced off again.

Actually, it's become a matter of some urgency.

Has it?

Don't worry, dear, I shan't keep you long.

I watched it again recently and it is a beautifully controlled piece of writing.

But sex is very much at the heart of it.

And even though - or perhaps because -

Frankie Howerd, as we know now, was gay,

and the last person to be leching after these toga-clad women.

Frankie Howerd's whole act was sort of based on a fictional sexuality.

What?

He was almost the walking embodiment of the double entendre

and he just played it for all it was worth.

Oh, bottoms up!

Ooh, definitely, as soon as I get back!

Sex was doomed to repeat itself,

first as farce, then as tragedy.

'70s sitcom was one long winter of discontent

for men and women, inside the canon and out.

In George and Mildred, they flip it.

In a way, the jokes are the same, but the clever thing they do

is it's Mildred who has the desires.

She is a woman who wants to live

a full sexual life, and her husband is

terrified of sexuality, terrified of HER sexuality in particular.

Yootha Joyce just wasn't the most beautiful woman in the world,

but she was very attractive and very striking and very strong.

She was always a very strong woman.

You always felt like she was in control. You would have the very frequent bedroom scenes where

they'd be switching the lights off to go to sleep

and Mildred's quite horny and George just wants to go to sleep.

Thanks to the sexual revolution,

we women were now free to be just as frustrated as the men.

-Hello, George...

-Oh, you're still awake?

-I'm afraid so, yes.

-Oh, Gawd.

I don't know whether she struck a chord with middle-aged women

up and down the country, but her sort of iconic sexual frustration

was very sort of touching, but it was quite relentless

and quite sort of broad.

They won't have a very comfortable night in this single bed.

-Oh, they're not going to sleep here, George. No, they're sleeping in our bedroom.

-What for?

-Well, because I'm not having her sneering at this one.

-Well, where are we supposed to...

Oh, no, no, no!

Yes, George.

No. I mean, we'll be squashed up against each other.

Yes, George.

The thought that they had to share a bed - and I think, as he says in

the scene, "But we might touch each other, we might accidentally touch"

the awkwardness just sort of sends shivers down my spine.

But it's a brilliantly done scene, and the dynamic with their relationship is quite subversive.

It IS legal, George. I mean, we are married.

Yeah, I know, but it's your nylon nightie, see.

-It gives me electric shocks.

-I'll take it off.

No!

You can imagine a scene like that, if it was placed in a serious drama, being very tragic and being a very

kind of serious revelation of a relationship which is in decline.

I tell you what, the caravan. Yeah, I'll sleep in the caravan.

-I'll sneak out there after they've gone to bed.

-Oh, George!

And this is one of the interesting things that sitcom can do,

that it'll point out things which, really, actually are very tragic.

But because those ideas are told in terms of comedy, for some reason

that's seen as more comfortable to audiences, and we don't necessarily see the tragedy that runs through it.

But we could see the history of the depiction of sex in the British sitcom

as one which is highly tragic throughout.

And yet we've been quite happy to laugh about that for the past fifty years.

Do you mind if I just check your paintwork while I'm here?

-I thought it might need another coat.

-It's had five already, Mr Rigsby.

I know, Miss Jones, but it's groaning for it.

Rising Damp's a lovely programme.

I mean, really, you can see that it was a play.

But it's got this fantastic, cramped little world,

which is straight out of Harold Pinter, of bedsitting rooms

and raggedy cardigans and unfulfilled desires.

At least they don't have to draw diagrams for us, Rigsby.

No-one has to tell us where the erogenous zones are.

-Huh. The what?

-The erogenous zones, Rigsby.

-Oh.

-He doesn't know where they are!

Well, of course I do. Well, they're near the equator, aren't they?

Rigsby wanted sex, really. He thought Miss Jones would give it to him.

And she wanted it, but she didn't want it from him, she wanted it from Phillip.

Phillip!

And he didn't want to give it to her.

Alan wanted it from everyone.

So, you know, there you go, that's what was swilling around underneath it all.

You take the ear. That's an erogenous zone.

You blow in Miss Jones's ear, and you'll be staggered at the results.

Now, you watch your tongue. This is a respectable house.

I mean, Rigsby is really up there with the Mainwarings and the Basil Fawltys.

And, I have to say, you know, the way Leonard Rossiter plays it is absolutely brilliant.

Where do I go wrong, Mr Rigsby?

Perhaps I should be more permissive.

-No.

-No, no, no.

No, no, you're an example to us all, Miss Jones, someone to look up to.

It was always radically unlikely that he was going to get off with Miss Jones.

You see, Miss Jones, there's no, er...

And he does it in such a terrible way, such an awkward way.

-In fact, the more sophisticated he tries to be, the more cack-handed he is.

-Is there a draft in here?

I don't think so, Miss Jones.

But that was the joy of it. He was just such a failed little man but also kind of a very British hero.

-Well, I'll be saying good night, then, Miss Jones.

-Good night, Mr Rigsby.

Rossiter would soon move out to the suburbs and to the BBC,

but sex would remain just a fantasy.

Oh, the thing about Reggie Perrin and sex is that because David Nobbs had written that show about a man

having a midlife crisis, which really chimed with people, and also because

the 1970s were Britain's midlife crisis, sex had to come into it.

Writing the book, which came before the series, I really was taken by the character of Joan.

And I thought everybody has their relationship with the secretary,

and Reggie being a sort of archetypal boss having a crisis, in a way, must go through that.

What's quite nice is that Leonard Rossiter wasn't having sex with Sally Thomsett, he was having sex,

or trying to have sex, with basically Audrey Roberts from Coronation Street.

I said I'm ready.

Ready for what?

My first day, it was only Leonard and myself, on that day, that were called.

To the chairman... Joan?

-Yes, Mr Perrin?

-You have lovely breasts.

Ooh!

And we journeyed to this field a bit out of London, and the location,

then it was all set up, and the next thing you know you're running towards each other and in huge clinches,

and he was on top of me and I was on top of him!

And that was my first meeting with Leonard. And lovely it was, too.

And I thought, "I'll take it a stage further. I'll actually get him to invite her home."

What is this crisis all about, Mr Perrin?

There is no crisis, Joan. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. Forget it. I'm sorry.

I'm awfully sorry. No, I'm terribly sorry.

I shouldn't have...

I remember leading Reggie upstairs, and he came rather like a lamb to the slaughter, if I remember the scene.

His little shoulders went all hunched,

and it was like dragging a naughty schoolboy upstairs.

Rossiter lusts.

He lusts in Perrin, he lusts in...

Well, all his characters are lustful and yet at the same time convinced

that when things go wrong, they will desperately go wrong. So they have to disguise, they have to hide things.

He has to turn the Queen's portrait away, because he disapproves of what he's doing.

He dislikes his own lusts and his own desires.

I think he gets very frightened by what he's done.

I can't go through with this. Yes, you can. No, I can't.

Yes, you can! No, I'm sorry, I can't.

And the reality of it is not like the fantasy.

I think it's a fantasy that should have remained a fantasy to him as well as to us. I mean, we see those

famous fantasies when he's having sex on the desk,

but I think that's how he likes it, really.

And suddenly he realises, is this going to work in real life?

He's terribly relieved to have an excuse.

-DOORBELL RINGS

-Oh. Oh, hell. Oh, damn. What a shame.

Oh, just our luck, eh?

Oh, damn, damn, damn.

You don't have to answer it.

Er, no, no, but I better had. It might be somebody.

Reggie Perrin isn't that much about sex.

What's funny is the idea that this middle-aged, buttoned-up man

suddenly is overwhelmed by lust, and his lust is about as imaginary

as his hippopotamus-incarnated mother-in-law.

It's all in his head.

-These are the Seventies, aren't they, Percy?

-Yes.

-Yes, exactly.

But there was one practice that was guaranteed to raise a laugh.

Taboos are breaking down, certain practices once considered horrifying

are now de rigueur in certain circles, aren't they?

I had a moment in the first Reggie,

when Reggie is trying to destroy himself by being absurd,

when he pretends to be madly in love with one of his shop managers,

who returns the love, to Reggie's absolute horror.

I'm free any night next week.

Oh, my God! Oh, next week? No, next week's out of the question.

I think now that people would be just slightly worried that I was mocking homosexuality.

But if television got laughs from homosexuality, it was also uniquely placed to combat the prejudice.

Agony, the LWT show,

is a show that perhaps has been underwritten in the history of the sitcom,

but if you look at sex in particular, it's an important, pivotal show.

-Hello, Gary...

-Maureen Lipman is the star, an agony aunt

who talks candidly about sexual problems

but also it has this homosexual couple in it,

who aren't used for comedic value, who aren't there just to be camp and a laugh.

Let's begin at the beginning with Agony.

We needed somebody who was sweet and kind and normal.

It became the two gay boys.

How long has it been for you two?

It's three years today since you introduced us.

No! And are you still happily unmarried?

Made for each other. The only reason we row is because we enjoy kissing and making up.

The second thing that was interesting was,

the television company for which we worked had an extremely powerful

homosexual group in its management.

-Jane, if there's anything you want.

-Anything at all.

'We didn't overdo it, I don't think.'

But we did try to suggest you could only be frightened

of something you couldn't understand and these people

were infinitely understandable,

therefore you couldn't be frightened of them and you couldn't hate them.

As we entered a new decade, sex was back stalking the suburbs.

Carla Lane's Butterflies told the story of a woman

on the edge of an affair, and not just any woman!

I'd been doing a lot of comedy and decided I'd like more serious work,

but I wasn't getting offered

serious work, because I'd done 25 series of silly mums.

The thing about Rea was she was a dreamer and she wanted

more excitement in her life and she wanted a bit of romance,

which she didn't get from her husband.

Right, that's lunch finished.

I don't see how the word "finished" comes into it.

You whipped mine away as I was approaching my third chip.

Someone like Wendy Craig was this figure

who'd been in all these conventional sitcoms in the past,

the very traditional suburban domestic sitcoms.

And the idea she's going to play a woman having an illicit affair

and is not judged within the script, is really revolutionary.

I'm Leonard, by the way, Leonard Dunne.

I'm Rea Parkinson.

-Mrs Rea Parkinson.

-How do you do?

I took the idea to the BBC

and the Head of Comedy went pale and anxious,

practically collapsed, when I said I want to write about a woman

who has a good marriage, but she falls in love.

"Oh, we can't do that. Oh no, darling, that's for drama."

They first put it out on BBC Two.

Then when they realised people were not shocked

and writing to the papers

from Godalming, or somewhere, they said, "OK, let's put it on BBC One"

and it was away.

Rea, these are the 1980s!

Are they? Oh. Is there something special about that?

It's the age of freedom.

The age of not being scared of doing what you want to do.

'You can see that Rea is a character who's responding to the sexual revolution.'

You're going too fast.

She feels like she's missing out on something,

but she's not fully sure it's actually sex.

It's just another room.

'It's quite clear she still loves her husband,

'and her husband loves her.'

And there's lots of episodes where

they're attempting to work out how to communicate.

What happened?

The world happened.

So the problem she's got isn't necessarily with Ben, her husband,

or her children, it's that institution of marriage

and domesticity that destroys any kind of sexual relationship that most people have.

It's marriage that's the problem, not sex!

Much more special.

Rea wrestled with a dilemma, should she or shouldn't she?

You want to, don't you?

Yes, I want to!

The first sentence I wrote, I knew they must never go to bed, not ever.

What a shame, how cruel!

We never got to bed, did we?

No. No, we didn't.

But by now the cosy world of sitcom was under attack.

Old school innuendo was giving way to something franker,

and to a new generation, more honest.

There's an air of complacency about some forms of comedy,

just like there was in music.

So the punk revolution came along and changed music,

and the alternative comedy revolution came along,

both sides of the Atlantic, and changed the nature of comedy.

I'm not a virgin! I am not a virgin!

But by the time it reached television,

the attitudes of alternative comedy seemed strangely familiar.

All right, if I'm a virgin,

how come I know what a girl's bottom looks like?

From looking in the mirror.

The Young Ones employed cartoon violence and cartoon action

that you'd never find in The Good Life.

It kicked the form around, and it was probably a darn sight ruder.

Missed me, virgin!

But it wasn't, I don't think particularly groundbreaking

in its treatment of sex.

'The Rik Mayall character is about, again, the recurring theme of male sexual frustration.'

He can never get laid. He doesn't quite understand sex.

'There's a particular episode where Jennifer Saunders

'appears as this character called Helen Back, who's snuck into Rik Mayall's bed.'

And he believes he may have had sex with her, but may not,

and he's trying to trade on this in a way which is almost old fashioned.

At one stage, she even took her bra off!

The need for sex is one of the things that propels them, but the idea that characters

who are so, let's be kind and just say flawed,

are ever going to find a happy relationship,

particularly a sexual relationship with a woman,

we know that's never going to happen.

That's part of what the comedy is.

With everyone at it,

comedy writers had to devise situations where they weren't.

It'd been done brilliantly in the '70s,

could it still be done in the '90s?

Birds of a Feather, you can almost see as the flip side of Porridge.

What happens in Porridge is the men are in prison

and sex is always on their minds.

Birds of a Feather,

we find out what was going on while they were in prison.

I just remember how bad I felt when Darryl went away.

Yeah, but it's only natural to feel lousy when your old man gets locked up.

Quite often the comedy is between the respectable upright pair

who are waiting for their men

and this woman who wants and is going to take.

What made Birds of a Feather new

was the man-mad and married next door neighbour.

I can't think of another character,

either in a drama or a sitcom, that was quite so blatantly in your face.

When she sang Like a Virgin she was in seventh heaven.

That was to her, absolutely glorious.

Dorien's attitude towards sex was she took what she wanted

when she wanted, and that was fine.

She did it on her terms.

She wasn't afraid to put herself out in the marketplace.

She just wants men.

Dorien is a surprising character

because even though sometimes her sexual relationships go wrong,

actually most of the time she's highly successful, she gets the men she wants,

keeps them for as long as she wants and gets rid of them when she wants.

If you saw a man doing that you wouldn't think twice about it, but when you see a woman doing it,

suddenly she's this new word, she's a "cougar."

I need an honest opinion from you.

All right, you're an old trollop.

Well, that's how she lived her life.

I think she was probably the original cougar.

She's a rare character because she's successful in her pursuit of sex,

she's not in the first flush of youth,

she isn't an oil painting, but she makes it work for her.

'I think Dorien was incredibly liberating,

'both for herself and for other people.'

I had letter upon letter saying,

"I am just like you, everyone calls me Dorien."

Or, "Oh, my goodness I wish I had had the bottle

"to live my life as Dorien has lived hers."

Mmm! Is that a gun in your pocket,

or are you just pleased to see me?

It's a gun, actually.

But even in the '90s, sitcom could only go so far.

To start with, hardly anything could actually be shown.

'I think there was one scene with Chris Ellison where Dorien'

was in bed with somebody and I think that's as far as you ever got.

And could a promiscuous married woman

ever be a happy and fulfilled sitcom character?

There was a vulnerability to her and that's what made Dorien real.

It wasn't just about getting the laugh,

you saw the hurt behind that.

Don't you wish you'd ever had kids?

Sometimes, when I need an excuse to see Bambi again.

There was one moment when Sharon said, "Did you ever want children, Dorien?"

and she said, "There comes a time in everyone's life when you have to choose children or beige carpets."

I opted for carpets.

So you don't regret it, then?

Of course not.

The '90s were full of women behaving badly,

as in the fashion PR satire, Absolutely Fabulous.

It was a show that was quite frank about sex.

It usually called a spade a spade, but preferred it if the spade

had been designed by Christian La Croix.

This is Jeff, he's our dancer and this is Hilton, drama student,

top of the line, cream of the crop.

Fantastic. Hi, Hilton.

'There's an episode called Sex

'where it feels a good idea to give a sex party.'

You've scored there already.

And they invite two gigolos round, one of whom is played by,

though he wasn't at the time, one of the future stars of The Wire.

Has anyone ever told you, you look a bit like Sean Connery?

And I seem to remember quite a funny moment,

and this may be of mild historical interest, the first time,

I don't know what they're called, an erection stabiliser or something.

It was a spray that keeps you hard

and Edi thinks it's a breath freshener.

His tongue becomes essentially stiff for quite a long time,

which is useful and not useful!

For all its outrageous behaviour,

AbFab was a knowing '90s take on the sexual idealism of an earlier age.

Absolutely Fabulous is a sitcom about the consequences of the 1960s.

It's the idea of what happened to the swinging '60s boomers in the 1990s.

We see Edina has been a sexual character.

She's lived, she's had ex-husbands, she's got a kid, she's been wild,

but now, in a way, society's moved on and she slightly can't quite get it,

why there's this new conservatism, why there's this new morality, as portrayed by Saffi, her daughter.

It's disgusting, that is so degrading to women!

What do you mean? She's got the whip.

'It is a programme you could argue is highly conservative,

'because what it does is say,'

"Look at the ridiculous consequences of the sexual revolution."

And so in that way it's quite a reactionary programme in which

women who've come from the sexual revolution

are actually punished and seen to be ridiculous.

# We are sailing... #

But for its sexual politics,

one comedy famously captured the mood of the '90s like no other.

# Home again, across the sea... #

There's a thing with sitcoms

that sometimes they come along exactly as people are thinking about

the thing the sitcom's about.

# We are sailing... #

I have to use the word zeitgeist, I'm afraid.

It taps into the zeitgeist.

I think if I'd sat there at my desk in the early '90s and thought,

"What is really going to sum up the decade?"

I would probably have gone in a different direction.

The 1990s was a time when we were almost self-consciously grown up

and it was inevitable that in comedic terms

we would have to have a reaction against that

and the women had been, so it was the men's turn,

and the men all pretended to be lads.

Dorothy, I've got my flap open and I'm begging you to let me enter.

It certainly put its finger on

something of the way men were behaving and it contributed to it.

The characters in it became icons of that lad culture and they in turn

fed into it and it affected the way people behaved.

Honey, we're home.

It's about men trying to cope with that early '90s post-feminist women

who are in charge of their careers

and frankly don't particularly need the men in their lives.

As the series progresses that becomes more and more farcical,

so you get more and more laddish,

boobs, birds, beer, that sort of thing.

If women could only have either buttocks or breasts,

what would you sacrifice?

I'd be very sad to lose my buttocks.

-I know you would, mate.

-Can I have one of each?

We were given pretty much a free hand actually by the BBC to be as rude as we wanted to be.

# I'm a wanker, I'm a wanker... #

But one infamous episode on Christmas Day attracted

more complaints than any other sitcom of the age.

It was an episode in which Dorothy wanted to have children

and she'd given up on finding other men,

so she asks Gary if he would...

Fertilise me, Gary.

Fertilise me like you've never fertilised me before.

Of course when it came down to it, he didn't like the pressure,

so he ended up trying to... I can't remember it was such a long time ago.

It was an attempt by Gary to boost his sex drive, I think,

and he used pornography.

'Lots of sticky tissues was the nub of the problem,'

particularly sticky tissues stuck to Dorothy's face.

Understandably people thought, "I don't know if I want to see that when I'm surrounded by my loved ones"

but you know what, I don't care.

I think it happens and therefore we should show it.

It was interesting because the response that came from

the regulators and the BBC precisely said,

"Perhaps this was the wrong thing to broadcast at Christmas."

They said, "This was a perfectly appropriate thing for Men Behaving Badly to do, but at Christmas,"

which has an assumption about familiness,

"then that's not the right place to put it."

I don't know how we took that long

to really deal with the subject of masturbation,

because frankly it's very central to young men's lives

and therefore it was remiss of us to wait till Christmas 1999 to do it.

Have you got a light, Tony?

No, not that drawer, you can't!

If we broke any ground

it was in dealing with the delicate relationship

between a mainstream audience and the subject matter.

We dealt with pornography in an earlier episode.

Tony has a girlfriend, which is quite rare for him,

who discovers that he's got a drawer full of pornography

and he does, for him, quite an articulate defence.

What's she got that I haven't?

Nothing, it's just that, well, she folds up into a nice handy size

and sits quietly in the drawer.

And his girlfriend understandably says,

"It's a deal breaker, I don't think you should be reading these things."

Does that really turn you on?

How can that possibly... Oh, yes, it does actually.

How can it?

She's naked!

Yes, but she's obviously freezing to death.

She's sitting on a fork lift truck feeling exposed and stupid

and like a piece of meat.

How can that turn you on?

Well, she's naked!

It's interesting to compare it with Friends, the American sitcom,

in which pornography seemed to be

tolerated and embraced by the female characters in Friends.

We are looking at Playboy.

Oh, I want to look, too.

I don't know whether that says something about our sitcoms,

or our culture, but I certainly was surprised that

America seemed to be more liberal

about pornography, at least if you use sitcoms as your guide.

By the '90s we were waking up to an uncomfortable fact,

American sitcoms were just as funny and maybe more daring.

It's funny, because I grew up thinking American comedy

and American TV in general,

was more repressed, and more awkward about sex and sexuality than British

television and then something like Seinfeld came along

and completely blew my theory out of the water.

I am never doing...THAT again!

One episode of Seinfeld,

The Contest, was entirely devoted to giving up masturbation.

Far from prompting complaints, it won an Emmy.

-You don't think I can?

-No chance!

-Do you think you could?

Well, I know I could hold out longer than you!

Care to make it interesting?

In that scene where they set the bet up,

the men are surprised that Elaine wants to be involved.

Clearly there's an assumption there, women don't masturbate,

so she'd win the bet easily.

I want to be in on this too!

-No, it's a whole different thing because you're a woman!

-So what?

It's easier for a woman not to do it than a man.

We have to do it, it's part of our lifestyle.

I think it was really pioneering to do something like that and on

a huge show that was a big mainstream success.

Did you make it through the night?

-Yes, I'm proud to say I did.

-So you're still master of your domain?

Yes, I am master of my domain!

Even when they used phrases like master of their domain,

everyone knew what they were talking about in Seinfeld.

And again it's really clever because you have the woman, Elaine, actually losing the bet.

'I think it's interesting to listen to the audience responses,

'because there's a slow realisation,

'you can hear that the audience laughter gets louder

'as the realisation of the implication of what she's doing.

-You caved?

-It's over?

You're out?

Oh, my God, the Queen is dead!

I think running through that, and running through the whole episode,

is an interesting idea about gender.

Men Behaving Badly can have ideas of men masturbating,

but the idea of women masturbating is still taboo in most cultures.

-Any fun, fantasy type things?

-No.

Not sharing the British love of the loser,

sex seemed ubiquitous in the most mainstream American sitcoms.

If you tell me I might do it!

In Friends, the idea that young people

have sex with each other, just like everyone knows they do, is a given.

Sex isn't an issue. It's discussed in a minutiae of detail

that in the British sitcom, particularly in the '90s,

by the 1990s, we had no idea we could write that.

There are scenes on prime time US Thursday night NBC

where Ross and Rachel are in bed together,

discussing sexual fantasies about what they're going to do next.

OK, did you ever see Return Of The Jedi?

Yeah.

Do you remember the scene with Jabba The Hutt?

Well, Jabba had as his prisoner, Princess Leia.

Ross wants her to dress up as Princess Leia. Now in Britain, that would be a bit "Ooooh!"

But in America that's just "well, what do you fancy?"

They draw the comedy out of it, they make it funny,

but it's not an issue, it's just there.

Communication in American sitcom is in the end always possible.

British sitcom seems to say communication is never

fully possible, we can never fully understand each other

and therefore if we can never fully understand each other, it becomes pointless trying to communicate.

Oh, I've got something in my eye.

Back home Gimme Gimme Gimme seemed to catch Britcom at the crossroads,

about to embrace the new freedom

yet still rooted in the old world of innuendo and frustration.

Gimme Gimme Gimme was, I think,

one of the most frank portrayals of sex in British sitcom.

You know, Jonathan Harvey is a great writer, and I think he was very open

about things, just when you think taboos can't be pushed any further.

What's it like having a knob?

The language of Gimme Gimme Gimme was sort of, erm...dirty!

Bawdy. It's sort of in the vein of a slightly more up-to-date,

slightly postmodern Carry On film.

-Is he a ventriloquist?

-Well, I wouldn't mind

him sticking his hands up me skirt and making me lips move.

Sex was really important to the characters,

just because they were both single and both desperate.

I haven't had it in weeks.

The next bloke I meet

is going to need a pickaxe and a Davy lamp to break his way in.

I think the ideal man for her was Tom.

It was just that she didn't really believe that gay existed.

She thought he was just being slightly lazy.

They did eventually kiss. In our millennium special episode,

they did have a snog, which was fabulous for Linda

but not so fabulous for Tom.

In one respect, this co-hab comedy with a twist marked yet another

step forward in sitcom's shedding of its inhibitions.

I do think it's interesting, just from the point of view

it was the first sitcom on British telly, a British sitcom, anyway,

where one of the lead characters was gay.

I mean, Queer as Folk had come out

I think either the same year or the year before,

so there was clearly an appetite for stuff with gay characters in.

But this was the BBC, and this was quite mainstream.

Was he any good? Did he move your earth?

He was a bit toothy.

Comedy had come a long way since the days of Mr Humphries. Or had it?

There's a way in which it very explicitly throws back

to stereotyped representations of homosexual characters,

but in doing those very kind of knowingly and over the top,

still now it's difficult to kind of work out if we can think of that

as a progressive kind of deconstruction of,

and deliberate over-the-top performance of camp stereotypes

or whether it's just a rehash of those for a modern audience.

In the new millennium, sitcom moved fast.

Adultery, sex before marriage and homosexuality

were no longer its problem.

And there'd soon be sitcoms

that would make Gimme Gimme Gimme seem tame.

There are people who are writing sitcoms who grew up in the middle of the 1990s.

They've got no sense of that frustration

which has been so central to the creation of British comedy.

So now what you've got is you've got an amazing freedom in comedy where

literally - sexually, at least - almost anything is possible.

Hmm, women. There they are, walking around.

And they've all got them, under their clothes, hiding there.

But I know the secret.

Vaginas.

It seemed sitcom man was free at last

to say exactly what was on his mind.

The whole premise of Peep Show is that we're hearing people's interior monologues,

and we're hearing the interior monologues of two young men,

so it's no surprise that

a lot of the time what they're thinking about is sex.

She's definitely got one.

She's trying to make out she hasn't got one, but I know she has.

Got to stop thinking about vaginas!

You know, when they're walking around, when they go to a disco,

at a gig, in a club, they're seeing women.

All they can think about is sex all the time. And then he walks into the toilet.

-What's going on?

-Barney's only locked himself in the bloody bog.

-What have you done to him?

-Nothing. Jesus!

-He's a fucker!

-Has he been sucking you off?

-No, course not.

-Yeah.

-Well, maybe once.

Sitcom's pushing back taboos all the time.

Maybe not so much in what they show,

But they're pushing taboos back in what they talk about and the language they use.

And, you know, whether it's The Inbetweeners talking about blow jobs

or Peep Show talking about sucking off or just generally the sort of

terms they use for sexual organs,

this has changed a lot, particularly, I think, in the last decade.

Don't suck him off, all right? And don't make him suck you off.

Just get him out there without any more sucking off.

Of course, there were still rules about what you could say,

but they'd changed a bit since Alf Garnett's day.

We're rationed to 25 bloodys per script.

And I remember once doing a deal with a BBC producer.

It was four "bloodys" for two "tits".

At the BBC now, you fill in a form that is essentially a fuck request.

You ask the channel controller for a fuck,

obviously in the nicest possible way!

And it's their decision, as it were,

the number of fucks they'll give you.

I'm likely to use an awful lot of what we would call

violent sexual imagery,

and I just wanted to check

that neither of you would be terribly offended by that.

It seems to me one of the things

that comedy has a sort of duty to do is to keep pushing,

because comedy can say things

which serious programmes can't, I think, sometimes.

You look at a show like The Thick of It,

where it's Malcolm Tucker's birthday,

and his PA brings in a box.

It's clearly a cake. And he opens it,

and it says in icing on the cake, "Happy Birthday C-*-N-T."

This could be from anybody.

Ah, it's from the Prime Minister.

Clearly, for that audience,

language isn't the great headache, or rather some language.

You know, racial language now is much more frowned on

than sexual language.

So it's not that we're no longer offended,

we're just offended by different things.

-What's the

-BLEEP

-doing here?

-Eh?

There was a key moment in the 1990s in British comedy,

which actually happens completely off screen.

The Independent Television Commission,

the body that regulates television,

published its regular "what offends the viewers?"

At some point in the mid-1990s,

sex fell down the list and race went up the list, and that was

when Britain started to find

the idea of sex and rudity and nudity not that big a deal.

But actually, it's quite a big deal to be racist.

Now, after that,

comedy starts to move into a much more open direction.

Wow. What's this?

-I thought you might like to watch.

-Really?

-Yeah.

In a sitcom like Him and Her on BBC Three in 2010, the key characters

are a couple who just basically are in bed the whole time.

-I don't mind, if you do something for me.

-Like what?

Still that programme is very much about the negotiation of sex

between men and women, and the ways in which,

quite often, women hold the strings in terms of sex.

-Like letting Laura pop round?

-Laura?!

She's my sister, Steve. She's feeling really down about Paul.

That's an idea that's been going on in sitcom for years,

so the reasons why sex is funny are the same now as 50, 60 years ago.

Still, it seems an awfully long way from Hancock's Half Hour.

And in today's multi-channel world, what will be the last taboo to go?

"Taboo" is a funny word.

There are a great many that remain,

and there are things which can't be dealt with in sitcom.

I was once approached by a man at Yorkshire Television,

and he said to me, "David, we want to do a play about sex abuse,

"and we immediately thought of you."

I said no.

But maybe comedy will be kept in check by the oldest taboo of all,

not being funny.

If you go further than the audience wants you to,

either in language or material or just reference, they won't laugh.