Pillow talk

Wonderland: The British in Bed (BBC2, Thursday) consists of long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of extreme embarrassment. The notion is to get couples — old, young, black, Sikh, gay — to sit up in bed next to each other, in nighties and jimjams, and talk about their lives as partners. Presumably, the notion is that in these relaxed circumstances, even with a camera crew at the foot of the bed, they will be inclined to tell us all.

But they don’t. For a start, they hardly talk about sex, except in the most general way. The fact that they’re in bed, accompanied only by a cameraman, a soundman, a director and a battery of lights, doesn’t lead them to say things like, ‘But what really gets me going is when he…’ There was a touching moment when the young Sikh man (his beard must get in the way a lot) says, ‘I don’t think we have as much sex as we’d like to,’ and his smiley young wife says, ‘We get as much as we need to.’