End of the affair

Series two of BBC drama Babyfather is being billed as 'sexier and raunchier'. But raunch, argues Jason Deans, is no longer a ratings-grabber

Monday October 28, 2002
The Guardian

The recent flurry of tabloid headlines when writer Andrew Davies promised his BBC2 Victorian lesbian romp Tipping The Velvet would be "absolutely filthy" seemed to herald the start of a good old-fashioned row about sex on TV.

In the end, despite a half-hearted effort by the Daily Mail to whip up a bit of controversy, it all ended not in a bang but a whimper. The closest Tipping The Velvet came to provoking a row was when disgruntled critics and viewers complained that, in fact, it wasn't raunchy enough. All a far cry from the mid 1980s, when a drama such as The Singing Detective had the tabloids and Mary Whitehouse up in arms. But if there are fewer rows about sex in TV drama these days, perhaps it is because the sex has become safer, less graphic and taboo-breaking. Or maybe the audience has just got more tolerant. As BBC2 bids to win more viewers for the second series of Babyfather starting this week by calling it "bolder, sexier, raunchier", Media Guardian asks TV drama producers and commissioning executives for their views.

Nick Elliott, ITV controller of drama.

"I was so bored by the sex when I saw Tipping the Velvet. Somebody fumbling with a dildo is the biggest turn-off. Ten years ago it might have been titillating, but now I don't think TV drama can compete with what's on offer from multi-channel services. You can see sex on TV any night of the week if you choose the right channel. And there's also plenty of it in documentaries on the terrestrial channels."

Nicola Shindler, founder of Red, the independent producer behind Queer As Folk, the Channel 4 drama that drew criticism for its gay sex scenes.

"We cut sex unless it's absolutely part of the story. Otherwise it's as boring as a long car chase. I've got a reputation for putting lots of sex in Red's dramas, but I don't think I do. Maybe I'm just not that easily shocked.

"I don't think the sex in Queer As Folk was that graphic, it was just that it was between two men. It was there because the teenage character Nathan had to have the most extraordinary night of his young life for it to change his life. But after that it's just what bits go where, so you get it off the screen as quick as possible. Not for moral reasons, but for story telling reasons.

"I also think society's attitude to sex has changed. If you look at what went on in something like I, Claudius in the 1970s, you wouldn't see that now. These things go in cycles."

Jonathan Powell, Carlton's controller of drama, was head of drama series and serials at the BBC when Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective was first broadcast in 1986.

"I don't think explicit sex shocks people in the way it used to. Nobody was even shocked by the proposition of Tipping The Velvet, even before they saw it. In Mary Whitehouse's day there would have been a monumental row.

"A couple of years ago we did a drama called Dirty Tricks, with a scene where a character played by Martin Clunes watches a woman masturbating. I thought that would create a row, so I went through the scene meticulously with the programme-makers and our compliance people. But there was not a whisper of complaint. In 1980 you couldn't have put that scene on TV.

"The late 1970s and early 1980s was the first time sex moved into the arena of more popular drama. A lot of the big writers, such as Dennis Potter and Troy Kennedy Martin, moved out of the more specialised area of single dramas into more mainstream stuff. The Singing Detective took sex out of the arthouse and onto BBC1 primetime, which was another reason why it was so shocking.

"In the 1980s there was huge pressure from the Whitehouse lobby and the Thatcher government, which hated television. TV was under much more political scrutiny, so there was more chance of a row over something like The Singing Detective."

Greg Brenman, head of drama at independent producer Tiger Aspect, whose credits include Bodily Harm, Playing The Field and Fat Friends.

"Sex can sell a show. You only have to look at Tipping The Velvet and the coverage that got. But as a producer you want to make sure sex is integral to the story and not gratuitous. When you're smart about it, like in Sex And The City, it becomes the core of the piece and there's room for clever drama about sex.

"You're always aware of the watershed and what you can and cannot achieve. The recent drama we did for Channel 4, Bodily Harm, had quite an explicit sex scene that pushed it back to 10pm. Tim Spall's character sees his wife having oral sex with a neighbour. We weren't doing it for shocking reasons, it formed part of the crisis Spall's character was going through. So it needed to be quite graphic, it couldn't just be a kiss."