Cutting Edge: Who's dying for more sex on TV?

When arch-competitors such as TVNZ and TV3 team up to put on a united front you know there must be serious dollars - pardon me, a serious principle - at stake.
As someone who switches channels when the almost-obligatory bump-and-grind begins - I lack a voyeur gene - I'm intrigued by the free-to-air broadcasters' plea to show more of it. I understand their desperation. There seems to be a drive among programme-makers to push the limits of what is acceptable to see, whether it's the ongoing fad for people on the dunny or at the urinal, or that true test of character development without which no serious drama can be taken seriously, oral sex.
In living memory, just watching actors doing press-ups above a moaning woman was enough to tell us about the complexities of their characters, but such is our demand for verisimilitude that this is no longer enough and we have to see women kneeling busily in front of manly trousers or men with their heads up skirts. Neither activity does justice to the good-looking actors involved, whose busy little faces are naturally obscured from view; but they have bills to pay like everyone else.
The free-to-air broadcasters are appealing a Broadcasting Standards Authority decision about - as luck would have it - this very thing. The BSA ruled that seeing female genitalia followed by a fair old dose of cunnilingus in an episode of Hung after 10pm was a breach of the good taste and decency standard, in spite of warnings given before the broadcast and the late hour. Children are not expected to watch after 8.30, many parents would be surprised to hear, and content can therefore be progressively more risqué as the evening wears on.
The broadcasters have a point, in that people watching a programme based around the premise of the main character having a large penis has certainly been led to expect soft porn. The real issue is whether free-to-air broadcasters are free to show it at all. Cable TV can because it operates under different rules: you have to opt in to watching its R18 offerings, as opposed to free TV, where you get to see whatever is being broadcast without inviting it into your home.
If the decision is overturned in the High Court, it will be a huge victory for broadcasters who'd probably prefer to have no regulator ruling on good taste and decency, and who could, therefore, up their ratings swiftly.
Just imagine the advertising that would draw in. Makers of sex toys, assorted gels and pills, escort and massage services, kinky underwear - all would happily buy broadcast time to peddle their gear, and the money would roll in. It seems jolly mean of anyone to stand in the way of the profits, then, where the public may well be pawing the ground and whinnying for the stuff, and broadcasters are willing to give it to them. So Julian Miles QC has argued, anyway, on their behalf.
Well, actually he hasn't. He has instead argued that this is an issue of rights, as in the right to freedom of speech. That's the territory freedom of access to porn is argued in, elevating it to a rather more high-toned level than the Bill of Rights possibly had in mind. After all, porn is easy enough to get hold of, for modest amounts of money. You have to be over 18 to buy or hire it, true, but I suspect even that barrier is widely ignored. And on the internet it's open slather.
Whether you have the right to see explicit sex for free doesn't seem such a high-toned principle to me. In many countries, freedom of speech is an undreamed-of-luxury and people have died in its defence. I await with interest the day people put their lives on the line for free jollies. We're not that desperate.