According to Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis, “sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three.” But sex in peak-time television did not start – and, then, only fumblingly and furtively – until 1973. On 15 August that year, ITV premiered the sitcom Man About the House.
Its writer Brian Cooke had seen a few adverts in the flat shares section of the Evening Standard specifying “a male or female” flatmate. The phrasing was striking, as the convention at the time was for rentals being single-sex and, by heterosexual assumption, therefore no sex. Carla Lane’s The Liver Birds, which debuted on BBC One in 1969, featured two young women sharing.
