Cocktails and Records

I spent last night at one of my very favourite London cinemas, the NFT, watching one of their archive screenings. Last night’s offering was on sex education and how it has been presented on screen this past century.

This can be summed in two ways:

1. It is your moral duty to your country to control yourself (or else you’ll bring everyone else down with your nasty diseases)

My favourite example of this was a 1938 film called The Road of Health. This is essentially an animated warning of what happens when you stray off the Road of Health onto the paths of Prostitution and Immorality. Yes, you end up in the hell of Veneral Disease where flames of misery lap at your feet and make your life a continuous nightmare of torture and statistics on syphilius. But don’t worry, help is at hand - you can drag yourself out of the cesspit by crossing the Government services and treatment centres bridge back to the Road of Health. Hooray!

2. The human sexual act is best explained by reference to flowers, birds, rabbits, cows chickens, spiders and even mould; anything but humans.

Did you know that mould is looking for a perfect partner too? Well, it is and it likes to find the right mould, get married and then um… do whatever mould does. Anyway, it’s similar to what people do and we can all learn from it.

Despite most films being impenetrably euphemistic, we did see one brave exception - A New Approach to Sex Education: Growing Up, a very progressive film from 1971. When you think of sex education films from the 70s and 80s you think of carefully discreet diagrams of fallopian tubes etc. Not this one though - not only did you get to see a couple actually at it, but graphic depictions of erect penises and hairy 70s people wanking. You could feel the audience’s collective jaw dropping. Much to the disappointment of the film makers, Growing Up was promptly attacked by Mary Whitehouse and banned under the Obscene Publications Act before making it into classrooms. I wonder why…