Spying and potting

The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so much TV. It’s not that I’m against it in principle: I like my evening’s televisual soma as much as the next shattered wage slave with no life. But the reality is that you end up doing stuff like I found myself doing on this Monday night just gone — cringing at pert male arses heaving up and down in a sensitive gay love scene in some moody new BBC spy drama that is going to be occupying our screens for the next five weeks.

Why? I find straight sex enough of an embarrassment but watching two men going at it — even pretty ones like the stars of London Spy (BBC1, Mondays) Ben Whishaw and Edward Holcroft — really is an ordeal too far, especially when, as a viewer, you’re clearly expected to find it all languorously romantic and lovely, whereas what you’re actually thinking is: c’mon, you’re a spy series, so let’s have less shagging and more intrigue and killing.