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.