Cartoon counselling

The Trouble with Love and Sex (Wednesday, BBC2) was extraordinary and quite successful. They took two couples plus one lonely single chap, recorded them talking to counsellors at Relate (formerly the Marriage Guidance Council, following the same rule by which the Royal Association for the Protection and Furtherance of Deaf Persons would become Eh?) and then turned the resulting dialogue into cartoons, so you heard their real voices but saw only drawings of people who didn’t look like them.

These days, when people will suffer almost any humiliation to get on television, I am sure they could have found folk who would eagerly have appeared on camera to talk about the most intimate details of their marriage. But it wouldn’t have worked so well. We would have made judgments on their body language, their clothing, even the moles on their faces, all of which would have detracted from the conversations.