The excellent Rivals, an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster, in which 1980s rich people enthusiastically bonk (English for having sex), is back on Disney+ this week. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a short history of sexy telly.
“There was no sex in Ireland before television,” said Oliver J Flanagan, a man who, like many of his fellow politicians in that era, reproduced by binary fission. He was, specifically, referring to The Late Late Show.
You see, in the 1960s the population was shrinking so much that they put Gay Byrne, the sexiest man in Ireland, on the telly to try to get people in the mood. He told them about things like birth control and Protestants and the United States. Bishops and politicians were appalled. And also quite turned on.
[ How the Late Late Show opened the door to sex, divorce, contraception and feminismOpens in new window ]
I think the heterosexuals reading this can agree that the Kermit the Frog–Miss Piggy dynamic is at the core of all straight relationships. The fiery will-they-won’t-they tension between the amphibious theatre impresario and the porcine diva makes other TV romances – Ross and Rachel, Smurfette and Gargamel, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – look insipid. We all want what the pig and the frog have, really. Even if what they have ends up being grotesque, chattering pig-frog hybrids (see: my nephews).
