92: November 2024

Hello and welcome to Border Crossing issue #92.

Thank you so much for reading this and supporting my writing. A big bump of new sign-ups this month, so I’m very grateful. If you’re new, a warm welcome aboard, I appreciate you.

This issue, there’s sex on the tv.

November is hectic. This week I start tracking a new LP with my record producer hat on (can’t say more yet), staying in a gorgeous hidden corner of rural Sussex. Incredible songs.

Then I’m driving and piano playing for Jim Bob’s author tour, performing at Shiiine On Festival in Minehead, Louder Than Words literary festival in Manchester, plus a run of mostly sold out author events. Jim comes to Brighton for a Resident Records instore on Wed 20th.

Also, constant writing, all the time. I set an internal deadline of 30th November to finish a first draft and might actually hit it.

By the way, a quick plug: I’m greatly enjoying my ‘Creativity Counselling’ trial phase. So if you’re interested, in January I’m launching it properly. If you’re interested, it’s now available to pre-book (five slots only) so find out more here.

gems

1

The great Brighton author, Catalyst Club founder and beautiful psychedelic troublemaker David Bramwell has an excellent new book of essays, Outlandish, which explores counterculture figures and journeys. Bramwell is a godfather of the new weird scene, and a fine storyteller.

2

The University of Michigan spent a quarter of a billion dollars (!!) on ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ over a decade and achieved basically nothing. Nicholas Confessore’s dynamite investigation for New York Times magazine is making shockwaves through that troubled (and troubling) industry.

3

The second feature by French filmmaker Mati Diop is a unique fact/fiction blending sort of documentary, Dahomey, about the return of twenty-six coloniser-plundered objects from a French museum, to their original home in the Kingdom of Dahomey, therefore modern-day Benin. The film is partly narrated by one of the objects. It’s got a limited release, so may be hard to find, maybe check nearby arthouse cinemas.

4

The legendary children’s novelist and folklorist Alan Garner’s new memoir Powsels & Thrums is stunning.

5

My friend Jen went to London Zoo to meet penguins. She had the best time. Obviously people get excited about gay penguin couples, which are commonplace in zoos, and in the wild. But according to what the experts at London Zoo told Jen, what’s really going on is even more fun. It’s this:

all penguins are bi.

6

Channel 4’s Dispatches just exposed how the royals make tons of money off their enormous land ownership. It’s available on the website.

potato gem

Everyone in potato land is talking about the ‘nemo’ variety (named because apparently it looks like the fish in the Pixar film), which uses less energy in production, has had a successful Tesco supermarket trial and looks set to become part of our lives. Here’s Sky News with the details.

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92: sex on the tv

(tw: graphic content, obv)

Late to the party, we’re catching up on the drama series Industry, about a group of (mostly horrible) Gen Z people working in London on the highly competitive, very back-stabby trading floor of a bank. If you squint, it could be the Euphoria kids doing Succession — and quite a few people have said this show is filling a gap that Succession has left behind. But also, to this older British viewer (especially given half the main characters live together at different times) it’s a bit like a 2020s edgelord version of This Life. 

There’s loads of graphic sex and buckets of cocaine and pills get snarfed and everyone’s constantly betraying each other. But really they’re all just trying to get through the day, in late capitalism. It’s on the BBC but the BBC definitely didn’t make it: it’s the sort of high end HBO fantasy workplace drama that superficially cosplays realism, yet which couldn’t exist (even though it’s fiction) without the inherited language and palette of competitive reality television. 

Don’t get me wrong, having done the first two seasons, I love Industry, as bleak and horny as it gets. Both women leads, Marisa Abela (who plays Yasmin) and Myha’la (who plays Harper) are brilliant. Abela is from Brighton, sort of, and she played Amy Winehouse in that recent biopic. She acts in five languages. Sarah Parish shows up every so often to do a fantastically harsh turn as a powerful, predatorial client, while Jay Duplass makes a great tech bro, super smart, yet ghost-like in his vapidity.  

This show has left me pondering how there are so many more varied portrayals of sex on television today. As well as Industry’s ‘coke-addled toilet cubicle’ sort of thing, there’s the Disney reboot of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals being lauded for having lots of very eighties style, let’s call it ‘bonking’. Haven’t watched that yet but I guess we will (I’m still stubbornly resisting re-subbing to Disney+).

Though the plot and energy and characters are completely different, the London of Industry has a similar look and feel to the London of I May Destroy You. And ever since Michaela Coel’s masterpiece, I feel as if a more sophisticated use of — and exploration of issues involving — onscreen sex has been more often achieved, at least on good shows. Especially now, the graphic bits are becoming a device to depict and explore, say, class differences, power differences, which goes on a lot in Industry and also, for example, White Lotus, or Shogun, or the most challenging scenes in the (problematic but powerful) Baby Reindeer.

My favourite television show of this year so far is the Japanese adult animated period drama Blue Eye Samurai, which has some of the most unexpectedly graphic — and plot / character relevant — sex I’ve seen in a serious adult animation (by which I mean, not like the daft jokey stuff in Family Guy or Rick & Morty or whatever).

Anyway, I was pondering all that, when on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, suddenly Richard Osman and Marina Hyde were talking about how, in fact, there’s far less sex on television these days. Even the context was odd to lead to this conclusion: they framed the bit on how all the sex in Rivals was an exception, and that it was partly there to give a sense of the period piece — that it’s set in the eighties, so there’s more sex in it.

Rivals is to Howards’ Way, what Industry is to This Life.

I mean, those two, Osman and Hyde, know the film and television world as well as anyone, so I can’t bet money against them being correct across the board, however their line of argument felt way off-piste to me. And no disrespect to one of the nicest podcasts around, but it was strange, almost laughable positioning. Surely despite (or because of) this more prudish era we’re supposedly living through, in the real world, isn’t sex pretty much everywhere on telly right now, compared to any earlier era?

If Osman and Hyde are even partly right, and network television has reduced the overall amount of sex on telly, still, their conversation — asking why this is occurring — missed out the biggest obvious commercial reason, in fact a topic they’ve already previously discussed. Western film and television producers must now cater for a global audience far beyond the west’s own sensibilities. Major platforms have important distribution buyers in China, India, Singapore, Brazil, etc etc, with different cultural norms about anything graphic onscreen — and also censorious government gatekeepers, it’s obvious that if you leave out the shagging (or make it meaningless, so it’s easy to edit out) you avoid a bunch of export sales problems later on. Yet funnily enough, at the same time, many of those same countries are becoming rapidly more permissive (against the wishes of their ruling classes) even as we regress somewhat in the UK and USA. Culture wars roll on.

If there is a moderate reduction in the amount of shows putting hetero-conventional couple stuff onscreen, in the other direction there’s just surely a ton more variety and exploration of different contexts. Different kinds of LGBTQ+ scenes for a start, since there were none of those at all for many decades, even after gay life started to become accepted by mainstream het culture, still it was an aeon before it got proper screen time. Also, a lot more willies now, in marked contrast to back when it was only ever the women exposed.

We see non-judgemental (and also very judgemental) transactional sex that tells us stories about money and power, non monogamous sex of different hues, coercive sex in all sorts of direction, where we learn important things about the subtle, intimate dehumanisation process of coercive control. Tinder hook up culture. Remote sex via digital platforms, something millennials and Gen Z have constructed for themselves that many of my generation and older struggle to even comprehend. Stuff that teaches us about isolation versus connection, what intimacy even means, the uses of and impacts of technology.

Also now, occasionally, even sex with people with realistic, rather than ultra-idealised, body shapes. Thank god. There are a couple of medium graphic scenes in True Detective: Night Country where the power between two people is not where you’d expect, and that shifts how you see those characters for the entire rest of the show. I guess that’s quite a commonplace motif now.

I honestly feel as if, despite the series only ending in 2019, the Game Of Thrones model of showing (unapologetically exploitative) sex as primarily for male gaze titillation — perhaps helping the world-building a bit — but only secondarily for any direct story, character or scene-setting, already feels drastically outdated and icky.

To take an optimistic line: the instant online availability of porn hasn’t made sex in mainstream drama redundant, nor has it (yet) forced (or given cover for) television makers to put actual pornography into shows. Anyway, in the UK and US at least, laws forbidding that are far from being rolled back. Rather, the ubiquity of porn (and the popularising osmosis of its language and tropes across mainstream culture) seems more to have freed up scripted drama to be more diverse, subversive, nuanced, experimental, taboo-busting, with fucks carrying serious, complex plot or character notes.

Like, in Succession, when Keiran Culkin’s Roman has his complex, intense psycho-sexual — yet essentially non physical — affair with J. Smith Cameron’s Jerri. There are a couple of graphic moments, yet no physical contact at all. The first season of Industry has a similarly distanced-but-intense relationship unfold between Yasmin and Rob, a tentative sub/dom game with just one graphic incidence of physical contact in an empty corridor, then much later on in the story, a quickly abandoned attempt at a threesome. It might seem transgressive but it always makes total sense in terms of moving things forward.

The isolation of the pandemic changed so much, especially for Gen Z and Gen A youngsters. Thinking about it, I May Destroy You came only a year after Game Of Thrones limped to a close. But the former is entirely a pre-pandemic artifice, already distant in our memory. I May Destroy You was made pre-pandemic, however it landed in June 2020, into the very moment of shifting sands.

I wonder if in parallel to that, the emergence of ‘intimacy coordinators’ and modern filmmaking’s general improving sensitivity to keeping actors safe and non-exploited — while not perfect yet — has not got in the way (as old school film people — men, mainly — fretted in antiwoke style that it might) but in fact has overall radically supported the writing and improved how the fucking shown onscreen is purposeful. All of which goes hand in hand with Michaela Coel’s progressive storytelling approach.

By the way, Michaela Coel’s first show since I May Destroy You (finally!) is greenlit for next year, called First Day On Earth and has an absolute belter of a team onboard, with Succession’s Jesse Armstrong exec producing, via HBO, A24 and the BBC.

Don’t get the ick, but here’s a thing: it’s not more touching, so much as ‘gloop’ that is now graphically present where it never was before. Today, as a matter of course, we’ll see blood, sperm, poop, wee, all onscreen. Even if it’s put there to shock (that disgusting denouement moment in season one of White Lotus) after the first few times, how quickly that kind of thing gets subsumed into a new normalcy — and again moves in service to character development, plot device, connectivity. I wonder if the perceived grottiness of all that is generational: anecdotally, some men friends of my age (much more than women friends I think) are deeply put off younger skewing boxset television, specifically by this new emergence of ‘gloop’. They just don’t want to see it. Perhaps it’s the influence of pornography too. If you show a bit of some kind of ‘gloop’ (I’ll stop writing that word now) as a visual signifier, you shortcut through the easy access porn generation’s expectation levels. You don’t actually have to show so much activity, or attempt to film cheesy orgasm-face acting, to define something tangible.

I guess any portrayal of anything transgressive, onscreen, is likely going to move a dial. So even when something is put in that first time to challenge the viewer, all it really does is open a door. I can’t quite persuade myself that Richard Osman and Marina Hyde are correct. But I definitely feel as if sex on telly is better now, for the opening up of these taboos, the moving away from idealised normalcy, and the inability to (or at least the temporality of) shock. It’s more representative of the rich variety of life, rather than the prurient imagined (equally fantastical) simplicity of older times. Also, just better written.

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email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey

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All my love,
Christopher
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