Sex Box, Sex Box, you’re my Sex Box!

If anyone has been perusing Channel 4 recently then you may have recognised the resurgence on our television screens of that dreaded English taboo: sex.

The BBC have tried documentaries on young Brits’ sexual education and, more recently, Unsafe Sex in the City – a documentary following several sexual health clinics and focusing on the reckless sexual promiscuity amongst 16-30 year olds. Channel 4 have now realised that they too can prosper from a frank talk about sex. After all, it certainly attracts the viewers, with 900,000 people recently sitting down to watch the supposedly scandalous Sex Box.

Channel 4 claims to have ‘pioneered’ a new and honest series for a ‘Campaign for Real Sex’. The intention is to “reclaim sex from porn” by exploring our apparent addiction to available and increasingly violent Internet pornography. C4 points out that with “hardcore porn just a click away”, our generation has been born into a violent, dysfunctional and distorted version of sexual relations.

The series promises to pioneer a discussion forum for Brits where we can finally have a frank ‘chat’ about sexual intercourse and “what really happens behind closed doors”.

Whilst their intentions appear honourable, their plan sadly falls short. It doesn’t take a scientific study to prove that sex on television is on the rise, and more importantly is becoming ever more graphic as it moves precariously close to the 9pm watershed. Furthermore, it is not difficult to recognise that the country’s obsession with porn is also having a potentially disastrous effect on young British relationships in terms of sex, although at least there appears to be room to explore this further.

But with the launch of the controversial Sex Box on British televisions on Thursday, and with Good Morning America across the pond almost shrieking at the depravity of such a programme, I was pretty excited to see if the show was finally going to have a frank talk about bumping uglies.

Instead, it was all rather dull. The PR promised open discussions encompassing heterosexual, homosexual and disabled relationships across all ages and races, and so far it’s hardly offered much of a pioneering exploration of sexual intercourse, even if the volunteers were supposedly post-coital.

Sex Box is a simple concept. Three couples throughout the show are encouraged into an oddly sci-fi, Scandinavian looking box and are expected to perform together multiple varieties of their preferred foreplay and intercourse, with a red light constantly showing that they are ‘busy having fun’ to a live studio audience.

It seems like they all just got a cheap quickie out of the programme – let’s hope that they changed the sheets

There are no cameras, and no requirements. The plan hoped that the volunteers would then happily discuss their time in the box, provoking debate and radical honesty about ‘real sex’. With a panel of judges, disguised as ‘sexperts’, you couldn’t help but expect them to hold up a scoring card as if they were the judges on a new series of The SeX Factor.

Sadly, I was disappointed. As you would expect, the giggly couples hardly shared much at all – the final couple shyly announced, “we’d rather not discuss what we did, it’s personal”. After volunteering to go on a sex show where the whole point is to discuss your most intimate activities? Great – so what was the point in that!? Instead, we listened to some awkward patter that was neither progressive nor even mildly interesting.

Whenever the hour long television show appeared to finally be saying something new, most notably with a severely disabled couple, they explored it in little detail. It may have been some TV ploy to make me tune in next week, but it was incredibly frustrating to watch an honest couple discuss their obviously challenged sex life only for them to be cut off three minutes later. Even the homosexual couple seemed to be evasive with questioning despite initial appearances that they would be open about their time in the box.

The presenters were just as awkward, and whilst I’m all for choice and making the volunteers feel comfortable and at ease, why go on a very personal sex show and not be okay to talk about it in detail? Ultimately, it seems like they all just got a cheap quickie out of the programme; let’s just hope that they changed the sheets.

When the final couple were given the opportunity to be given some advice at the end from the experts, all of them gave pretty mundane quips about mixing up your sex life by changing the position each time. Woah, how innovative!

While dull in parts and certainly not what Channel 4 had promised, the show was remarkably amusing, if sadly for the wrong reasons. Whilst I certainly don’t feel that Channel 4 has just yet revolutionised the lives of thousands of porn-obsessed teens across the UK or really taught us much at all, it did at least give us a laugh.

Despite all this promise to embark on a new frontier of sexual discussion and debunk old taboos, it retained the stereotypical awkwardness of a group of 12-year-old boys laughing at Playboy behind the school bike shed.