TVScope Sex in the 90s: Stags and Hens Channel 4, 11th January, 11.05pm
'Oooh, this is really wicked, come and look at it." The titillating promise that you can get to see something wicked while preserving your virtue by morally disapproving of it is one of the oldest in the book.
In The Twelve Caesars, written two millennia ago, Suetonius warns that some of the sexual obscenities committed by the emperor Tiberius "are almost too vile to discuss" before he goes on to give us the details. In more recent times I recall an Irish movie in which a newsagent is avidly devouring the News of the World while tut-tutting that "I don't know how anybody can read this stuff."
So Channel 4's soft porn documentary on stag and hen parties in the 1990s is very much in an old if slightly foxed tradition. Using a disapproving tone in its voice-over, it manages to show the viewer a goodly number of oiled and gyrating boobs and bums.
The thesis behind the programme, as it always is in these cases, is that the world has gone to the dogs entirely. Apparently up to the 1990s, the British male and female had relatively innocent stag and hen parties. You might get drunk and embarrassed by a strip-o-gram but basically you could be back home saying your prayers in time for a good night's sleep. Nowadays, however, you could still be on your knees at the end of the night, but not to say your prayers.
Stag and hen parties, according to the programme, have progressed from the strip-o-gram to mini orgies in the brothels of eastern Europe.
I suspect that most people don't actually go to brothels or have sex with strangers on their stag or hen nights. Still, I suppose a minority of stag and hen nights are as wild as the telly suggests.
Does it do any harm? I'm not sure it does, despite the tone of disapproval in which Channel 4 told the story.
The world has been going to the dogs for a long time and will be for a long time yet.