Okay, readers, it’s time for “the talk”. When a mummy and a daddy – or another mummy that mummy knows vaguely, or mummy’s male friend, or the rugby team – love each other very much (or like each other sufficiently to have sex in a box), they get into a large box in front of a live studio audience and have sex in it, before emerging to discuss massage oils with a Flemish sexologist (it’s a real job like “pipe-fitter” or “actuary”) and a smirking Welshman. (Interns presumably hose down the box during the discussion segments.)
This is called "making love". It's a truly magical thing and nine months later a baby is born, probably on a Channel 4 programme called Birth Box. And that's why you are partly owned by a production company. I hope your first time is just as special.
Apart from Birth Box, which I made up and have just inadvertently pitched to Channel 4, this is the premise of the newly returned, oddly prudish but accurately named Sex Box (Channel 4), a programme in which people have sex in a box. It was invented, I think, when a daydreaming television executive accidentally said, "What if I get people to have sex in a box?" out loud at a meeting and someone else said "for a television programme?" and he looked guilty and coughed and said "Yes. A television programme. Of course. Yes."
Sex Box debuted in 2013 and it was presented by an uncomfortable looking Mariella Frostrup. In those days, it had loftier educational pretentions. It wasn't a mere Eurotrash spin-off, but a valid social experiment designed to see if it was possible for humans to have sex in a box. It was established that they could.
A strangely uptight box
The format is odd. Telling us, but not showing us, that there is sex happening in a nearby box is a strangely uptight form of titillation. Are they really having sex in that box? Who knows? It turns the whole enterprise into a sort of existentially troubling Schrödinger's Sex Box that may or may not educate us about quantum superposition and/or riding people. It is pretty silly.
Nowadays, Mariella Frostrup prefers more highbrow outlets and so can be found racing cars with a weeping Louis Walsh over on UTV Ireland's Drive, while being egged on by Vernon Kay (who, if the tabloids are to be believed, probably has his own sex box in the garden).
So the new series of Sex Box is helmed by Goedele Liekens (the sexologist) and Steve Jones (the Welshman). It features plenty of cut-away sequences in which nude models writhe sexily, as well as many many double entendres. "I'd definitely come again," says one man, to much thigh-slapping hilarity.
Jones spends most of the show gurning and eyebrow raising and metaphorically rubbing his trouser legs like a Carry On character. He has no function other than to direct people towards the sex box – "Ready to go to the box?" – or to declare people's trajectory towards the sex box – "They're going into the box."
He is, essentially, a doorman for a sex box.
Rule of thumb
Liekens has more of a fundamental purpose. Her job is to give terrible relationship advice to sexually aroused exhibitionists. My negative assessment of her advice is based largely on the fact it never includes the sentence: "Don't have sex in a box on live television" (this has been a rule of thumb of mine for some time).
Indeed, she seems to think it’s a great idea when two platonic friends decide to have sex for the first time in the sex box (even their horrified friends sitting in the audience think this is a bad idea). It’s hard to tell where she’ll draw the line. Next week, I fully expect to see her smiling indulgently as a man in a Victorian diving costume leads a horse into the sex box.
Death becomes him
There's a horse on the finale of the sixth season of The Walking Dead (Monday, Fox). Nobody has sex with it. The Walking Dead doesn't really do sex scenes. What it does instead is bloody, visceral violence broken up by long interminable stretches of angsty dialogue and characters staring sadly into the distance.
Living through a zombie apocalypse is, apparently, very like adolescence and The Walking Dead is much like a post-apocalyptic Dawson's Creek (Dawson's Croaked?) except with angst about murdering rather than girls.
On the plus side, if you wait long enough, one of the pseudo- philosophical wafflers will inevitably be disembowelled by a zombie or shot through the eye with an arrow or, in this episode, beaten to death by a barbed-wire-enhanced baseball bat. The bat is owned by a charismatically psychopathic new baddie called Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Negan is a chillingly Trumpian leader for a post-apocalyptic age (as is Trump himself) and if I was trying to survive in zombie- ravaged America, I'd probably choose his leadership over the humourlessly Clintonesque hero, Rick Grimes (Rick is, as I've mentioned before, a terrible leader who makes terrible decisions).
“Give us your shit,” says Negan to our captive heroes. This is his catchphrase. Then the viewer watches Negan’s baseball bat rain down upon the bloodied camera lens.
It’s meant to be the death-throe point-of-view of a major character whose identity will be revealed in the next season (a bit of a cop out), but all I could think was, “finally, the sweet release of death”.
