Because every video-on-demand service needs an unauthorised blog

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The Sex Education Show



There's a favourable and very fair review on The Guardian website about The Sex Education Show. Bearing in mind the painful and just downright strange conversations I had about sex and relationships with my parents this is what caught my eye in Heidi Stephens piece:

This is not my kind of thing, as a rule - people talking openly about sex, how much they're getting it, what kind they're getting. I'd rather clean the oven. But this show claimed to present both teenage and adult perspectives on all matters sexual. And because I have both a 16-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, any advice on how to broach this stuff in a way that is less likely to scar my offspring for life is gratefully received.

As it turned out, I didn't need to make notes, because teenage son decided to watch it with me. Which I guess was what Channel 4 intended when they gave it a pre-watershed 8pm slot, but was entirely unexpected and potentially horrifically embarrassing (no, for ME, not him). He wandered in at the start, asked what I was watching, and decided to "give it five minutes". By the end he admitted it had been "interesting" and "useful". And in the mumble-heavy vocabulary of a 16-year-old boy, I believe that counts as a glowing review.


You can see it on 4oD. Alone. With your teenager. Or even with a parent.

The Channel 4 Sex Education website is here (and it's well worth checking out).

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Four Wives, One Man


I always mean to watch these True Stories docs on More4, but then find something easy and trashy on another channel and give them up. But last night when I got in and switched the TV on it just happened to be tuned to More4 (I think I'd probably been watching a repeat of a Grand Designs I'd seen before) and this doc was about half an hour in. And I was completely hooked. It was absolutely fantastic.
It follows a family in an Iranian village: a man, his four wives, twenty children and his mother. The women all have a story to tell of divorce, sadness and betrayal and watching the man squirming when they nag him or answer back is at least a little pay-back for the beatings they say he gives them. The mother pitches in with her view that her husband was a real man, who loved only her, while all five of her sons are 'just sheep'... And yet it isn't ultimately a tragic story. It is full of humour and banter between the women.

What's great about the way this is filmed is that there is no intrusive narrator, or interviewer. It is just the family, talking to camera or to each other.

I have already recommended the programme to everyone I know, and now recommend it to you.