Sex and the Sitcom - TV review

Sitcoms are my guilty pleasure,

writes Amy Burns

. Especially those awful American ones about young, hip people who live in trendy flats above cool bars and apparently have really good jobs but never have to go to work.

On a Thursday evening you can often find me curled up in front of E4 watching back to back episodes of The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two Broke Girls and Don't Trust The B**** in Apartment 23.

And every one of them is all about sex. Relationships, one night stands, couples, exes . . . etc, etc. It's just sex, sex, sex. Without ever actually showing anyone having sex, obviously.

It's mind-numbing stuff and mostly awful, but it doesn't require me to think – which come Thursday evening each week is generally a good thing.

But these are part of the 21st century wave of sitcoms, and it wasn't always this way.

According to BBC 2's exploration of how sitcoms have adapted over time to keep up with our ever-changing attitudes, I generally spout more filth before 9pm than the BBC dared to for about 20 years.

Call it an age thing, but for the first 40 minutes of the show they were talking about programmes I'd never even heard of. Rising Damp, The Liver Birds – they're all programmes I know I'm meant to know but genuinely, I've never seen them.

The main difference between sitcoms in, say the 70s, and current shows seems to be that while sitcoms once eluded to sex, nobody actually seemed to get any. George wasn't getting any from Mildred, June wasn't giving it up to Terry. Frustration was the key element to the humour.

But these days, if you believe what you see on TV, everyone is at it all the time. Even those geeky boys from The Big Bang Theory seem to get their fair share of girls.

And I guess that's the point the programme was trying to make – as attitudes towards sex started to loosen up and talking about it became more common place, the sitcoms had to keep up.

It's not that no-one was having sex until the 1990s, just that they weren't really talking about it that much.

Then all of a sudden everyone was talking about it and sitcoms had to try and shock us all with their up-front, in your face approach to it.

The 90s section of the show was a brilliant trip down memory lane for me. Birds Of A Feather, Absolutely Fabulous, Men Behaving Badly – they're all shows that I know and loved.

But even then, as a teenager, I don't remember thinking any of them particularly risqué. In fact, I used to watch them all with my dad.

Maybe it's a generational thing. I'm not shocked by sex, I'm not embarrassed by nakedness and I don't cringe easily. But I find it really interesting that some people do – or did, at least.

And again I guess that's sort of the point of the show. Our attitudes changed, so our TV shows changed.

But for those of us who weren't around until the 80s, it's always been the norm.

It's quite sweet to think that once upon a time we were all "oooh matron" when now we're apparently just sex mad.

This is one show that certainly made me think a lot more than any of those awful American sitcoms that have me hooked.