Why not re-name it… Reeling in the Leers?
Source: Irish Independent (Original Article)
When you sit down to watch an RTE1 series called Sex and Sensibility, somehow you just know that it’s not going to be time well spent. And when actor Simon Delaney looms into vision as presenter of this history of our sexual past, you can be pretty sure that sniggers rather than seriousness will dominate proceedings.
Delaney, you may recall, had hitherto fronted a series on modern Ireland — What Are We Like? Or Bejapers Weren’t We a Hoot? or some such title — which was notable only for its smart-arsed superiority and general vacuity. And that about sums up the new series, which, according to the relevant RTE web page, “looks at the lighter side of events that caused uproar in their day”, starting with the 1960s, a decade in which apparently “loins began to stir, films grew naughty, music became raunchy and Irish knickers got in a twist”.
This would-be jokey tone was transferred from page to screen by the presenter, who promised “a journey through five decades of Irish sexual history — smut, lewdness, promiscuity, and what we did when we couldn’t get any”. And the commentators who were dragged in to offer their own tuppence worth didn’t rise above Delaney’s level of tittering banality.
Ireland in the bad old days, according to Delaney, was “an island where kissing was dangerous and nookie was fatal” and Mary O’Rourke was on hand to observe that “there was no sex — I mean, of course there was, but people didn’t go around talking about it”, while Bill O’Herlihy solemnly recalled that sex “was a very taboo subject when I was young”. Those were about as good as the insights got.
Then along came television — “a one-eyed RTE monster poised to spew sex into God-fearing Irish homes,” in Delaney’s words — and the latter part of this smirking programme (they should have called it Reeling in the Leers) was devoted to tired old recollections about Gay Byrne and The Bishop and the Nightie and whatever daylesford accommodation you’re having yourself.
At the end it …continue reading