Let’s talk about sex | 6 September 2018

This week was bad news for fans of good television drama series — mainly because there’s now three more of the things to keep up with if you don’t want to feel left out of office conversations.

The one that stirred up the most advance media excitement was Wanderlust (BBC1, Tuesday), on the traditional grounds that it promised to be unusually explicit about sex. And in that, it certainly didn’t disappoint. The first episode began with a flurry of masturbation (not a phrase I can remember using in a TV column before). First, Joy, a middle-aged therapist, slipped a hand beneath the morning bedclothes — until her teenage son came in to ask where his shoes were. Then, a female teacher at the school where Joy’s husband works stumbled across a male colleague pleasuring himself — presumably rather nostalgically — over the lingerie section of a mail-order catalogue.

Both masturbators, though, had the same reason for their actions: they weren’t having sex with their spouses any more. And from there it was soon apparent that Wanderlust’s central theme would be the death of sexual desire in marriage.

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Joy and husband Alan, for example, are faced with the realisation that while they’re still in love and want to want to have sex with each other, they don’t actually want to have sex with each other. Not that they don’t try. In one particularly — and brilliantly — excruciating scene, Joy (Toni Collette) welcomed Alan (Steven Mackintosh) home from work wearing her best man-pleasing underwear and making a highly creditable stab at sashaying seductively, only for him to react with a mixture of horror, embarrassment and something approaching pity.

Wanderlust has been adapted by Nick Payne from his own stage play and those origins do show in the almost pathological degree of middle-class articulacy and candour displayed by all the characters.