Funny, tender and properly horrible: Channel 4’s Adult Material reviewed

A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie out of shot, she then films herself on her phone pretending to have an orgasm, posts the clip online and drives to work. Once there, she’s constantly distracted by thoughts of domestic chores (‘Whites tonight, colours in the morning, hang them out before the school run’) — which mightn’t be so unusual, except that her work consists of having sex.

But if the early scenes in Channel 4’s new porn-industry drama Adult Material suggested a cheeky, essentially light-hearted twist on female life-juggling, this soon proved deceptive. What followed was an uneasy mix of comedy, righteous anger, melodrama, unexpectedly tender family scenes, Ken Loach miserabilism and the properly horrible.

Hayley Squires stars as Jolene Dollar — she of the orgasmic carwash — who started in the porn business way back when storylines were in fashion and has since done well enough to send her children to private school. These days, though, she has to be motherly at work too — especially towards Amy, a young dancer whose recent leg injury has left her needing to find another means of earning a living. The trouble is that the now almost quaint films of Jolene’s youth have been replaced by well, pretty much anything degrading you can imagine — or perhaps can’t. As one director explains: ‘It doesn’t have to be sexy, it just has to be something you haven’t seen before.’ After all, so much porn is freely available that only the most ‘niche’ stuff will attract paying punters — which is where the properly horrible bits come in.

Meanwhile, the freely available kind has also ensured that Jolene’s screen career is familiar to the boys at the school of her teenage daughter Phoebe, who’s agonisingly torn between filial loyalty and disgust — and at an age when there are enough routine embarrassments without this excruciating add-on.