Pop Vultures

Remember, if you will, the most excruciatingly embarrassing experience you’ve ever had in your life. I know, I’m sorry to put you through this, but I’m trying to illustrate a point here. Are you doing it? Are you cringing right now? Well, just wait, because I promise you, the TV show I’m about to tell you about is at least, at least, a hundred times more excruciating than the most humiliating and awkward experience of your life. Are you ready?

OK, well, we’ll start with the title. It’s called Sex… with Mum and Dad.

I know, right? The BBC is doing incest now? And there you were thinking sexing up Sense and Sensibility was a travesty. Actually, it’s not quite that bad. It’s not actually a show about people having sex with their parents (Hi, people who just wandered over here from a clandestine Google search!), but it’s almost as bad. This is a show in which teenagers, who want to have lots of sex, and their parents, who don’t want them to have any sex, get together with Dutch ‘Sexologist’ (please!) Maria Schopman to discuss their issues openly and then complete bizarre and humiliating tasks in order to improve their communication.

This show, this show, people! I don’t know if I can properly explain to you how compellingly, dreadfully, awkwardly, excruciatingly brilliant it is. I don’t know if I have the words. I can’t watch it without burying my head in a cushion and screaming in horror. In the episode I watched last night, 17-year-old Kirsty was trying to convince her parents that she should be allowed to have her boyfriend in her bedroom with the door closed. Her parents, unsurprisingly, were not big fans of this idea. And in order to resolve this issue, the sex therapist had Kirsty and her Mum, separately, write down their answers to questions like ‘What’s your favourite sexual position?’ and ‘Do you enjoy using vibrators in sex play’ and then, AND THEN, Kirsty’s DAD had to guess which answers were his wife’s and which were his daughter’s. Yes way.

HELLO, CRAZY DUTCH SEX THERAPIST LADY? How is this poor man finding out that his daughter’s favourite sexual position is ‘reverse cowgirl’ going to make him MORE in favour of her having boys in her bedroom? Although really the issue is probably moot now, since after the trauma of having to tell her own father, ON NATIONAL TELEVISION, that she likes playing with sex toys, I don’t think Kirsty’s going to want to even think about sex for at least a decade.

In other episodes I’ve seen, teenagers have had to watch while their parents use Barbie and Ken dolls to illustrate their favourite sexual positions; families have had to sit round the kitchen table with a variety of novelty condoms and discuss which ones they like the best; a born-again-Christian Mum has had to give a presentation in favour of abstinence to her teenage sons, and all her teenage sons’ friends; and parents and children together have had to go on a road trip to visit the locations in which they lost their virginities, and discuss the way they feel about it. I AM NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP.

Watch this show. I’ve tried, and I just can’t convey the true awesome dreadfulness of it. You have to watch it. But make sure you have a cushion close by with which to muffle your screams.