Powerpoint: No sex please, we're Kiwis!

By FRANCES GRANT

There is far too much sex on television in prime time.

There is far too much explicit, horribly realistic sex on television in prime time and I can tell you exactly where it's leading.

Not that there's anything wrong with being upfront about the human act of sexual intercourse in all its interesting variations, but for the average punter slumped on the sofa for a bit of entertainment and fantasy at the end of the day, it's the wrong kind of sex.

Whatever has happened to vaseline-smeared lenses, nicely choreographed bedroom sequences and the notion that the act about to take place is going to be totally ecstatic or, at the very least, completely functional?

An episode of Sex in New Zealand will put paid to all that nonsense. On this show brave people front up and are amazingly candid about their sex lives. After the ordinary, very, very real people have shared their experiences, experts in neutral, non-sexual environments (corridors, offices, wide open public park-like spaces) explain things to us in their best sex-education-class tones.

Here we learn such ugly truths as the average Kiwi male really just wants to "climb into bed and get the job done and get off to sleep." We learn all about sexual dysfunction and that "sexual problems shouldn't be a joke." Of course they shouldn't be and on this show they are absolutely not a joke.

We have learned about the kind of trouble you can get into if you sell up shop and go for an American fella you met on the internet.

Then there was the gay sex episode: the ins-and-outs of running a threesome (the problem of finding a kingdom-sized bed, for example) and that kind of thing. All very educational, but what happened to that iron rule which still applied as recently as last year, I believe, that gay sex was allowed on television only very late at night or on TV4?

Now the frisson has simply gone. And should television have given in that easily? We have been denied the excitement of a pink-dollar boycott against advertisers until there was gay sex on telly at a respectable hour and the enjoyment of a rabid right-wing counterprotest.

Of course, no worthy treatment of sex is complete without the geriatric sex episode. Ageism exists, we learn. Not in this column, mate. "People would be shocked to know Grandpa was going to a brothel," the expert said. Yes, we are! Please, please don't shock us any further.

But apart from this brave foray into sex and the older person, the sort of sex on television in prime time is just the sort of sex to get the leader of the Opposition, Jenny Shipley, going. It's the sort of helpful information which could lead a population to go forth and multiply.

Sex on television leads to babies on television and there are enough of them and pregnant mums in prime time to bring on a nasty dose of evening sickness. Even the gay Sex in New Zealand episode got around to the lesbian couples and that donor-sperm-in-a-jar stuff.

Realistic sex on telly is all very well but you do realise, don't you, that so much procreation leads to programmes such as From Here to Maternity and discussions about nappy-filling and teething and burping in the slots where once glamour and escapism held sway?

And it won't stop there because once a trend takes root (remember real estate?) the worthiness and educational aspect soon end.

Expect makeover baby shows, changing babies and — hang on, perhaps this stage in the development won't be so bad — a survival-of-the-fittest baby game show.