Sex Box, Channel 4

Sex in a box, in a nutshell. That was the concept. Not literally in a nutshell, as that might have been difficult. But a big white cuboid thing in a studio. Designed – this is an educated guess - by Ikea, being tacky and easily assembled. Couples enter the box and, with luck, each other, and then come and talk about it, in front of a panel of sexperts. What could possibly, in the United Kingdom of embarrassment and irony, go even slightly wrong?

The foreplay was bang on the button. Mariella, the one with the blonde streaks and succulent larynx, telling us exactly what she was going to do to us. Ooh yes. Keep doing that, Mariella. The sexperts joined in. One looked disconcertingly like Sir John Gielgud, there was a sort of Dannii Minogue in 10 years' time, plus a token American. The token American, being American, talked with raging openness about what he liked to get up to in the privacy of his own bedroom. Threesomes mainly, one presumes not with the panel.

Everyone laughed, the way we do round these parts

Anyway, onto the main dish. People often (apparently) during sex think about other things like socks. One was similarly engaged in deconstruction as a series of tongue-tied sex voyagers trooped on for a nation's pleasure wondering if that 50 quid bet was really worth it after all. Why did these volunteers volunteer? “It’s important to have adventures,” said someone. What, adventures like sex in a box inside a television with Mariella’s penetrating questionnaire in lieu of a cig? Simon Cowell has a lot to answer for. You wanted to know, also, what it was like inside the box, and if someone changed the sheets between sessions. How long did they get to get it on?

No one was saying. No one was saying anything else either. Rachel, 21, couldn’t quite pin down her taste in porn. “It varies really.” She may have been talking about the weather. A middle-aged couple enjoyed “a variety of other things” on which they chose to shed no further light. They looked as if they just came from (as opposed to in) a planning meeting. A gay couple were just as diffident as the heteros, which proves something or other.

“I arrived, shall we say?” offered Matt of his time inside with his partner John before being stretchered to A&E to have his toes surgically uncurled. Only John eventually listed what they’d got up to as if running through the ingredients of quite a boring recipe for toad in the hole or spotted dick. “We rimmed, we had anal sex, we then 69'ed.” There may have been more but one’s fingers were by this time buried knuckle-deep in one’s lugholes.

Sex Box would have been brilliant in – ooh, let’s stick a pin in a map – Sweden. Where the box came from. Everyone tittered, the way we do round these parts. Sir John Gielgud could see that this was all about nervous deflection, but for everyone else this was basically a script reading of Confessions of a Window Cleaner. No one mentioned a single body part. Anyway, how was it for you?

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