Radio Sex
Warm female VOICEOVER, enthusiastic and not patronising.
Hello, young newly-weds everywhere. This is number 235 in our ever-so-popular series of lessons for young brides. Before we start, let’s all turn to page 69 in our Getting To Know You pamphlets, where we will find today’s position. If you look at the diagrams you’ll see that as usual each part of the body has been annotated with its own letter to avoid confusion. N is the nose, B is the breastbone, C is the coc- (turns page in script) -cyx, and so on. If you’ve been following the series you should know the others off by heart by now as you will have used them lots of times already!
Is he sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
Squat facing your partner with your H’s dangling loosely by your sides. Stretch your W’s up as high as they’ll go over your head then rest them gently on top of your partner’s F. Bring round your left J and hook it behind the T in your partner’s right O. Pull your own O forward until it is nestling against the K in your partner’s right G. Pick up your partner’s Q and place it inside the crook of your left K, then bend your T back as far as it will go. Take a moment to buff up his IQ if you can do so with a straight F. Now move your M to the front of your partner’s E, being careful not to poke him in the I. Taking his V in your left H, gently stroke his P and S. Now bring up your U’s to within an inch of his R’s. Sit down. Now take your left O in your right A and touch the tip of your partner’s Y with your W. Cross your fingers. As soon as his J is totally covered by your linked Z’s, you will have completed the new position.
Well, that’s position 235. We’ll be back next week with position 236, which is the only way of getting out of position 235. Good night.
PS
“Write what you know,” they say. I actually wrote this some time before I ever had sex with another person, so obviously I was having to play it by ear. Luckily I’d watched a lot of training videos so I wasn’t completely ignorant. On the other hand, completely ignorant is what I undoubtedly was. You wouldn’t think of trying to get away with anything like this these days, it’s just so, well, naff.
At the time, I was only aware of a technical writing problem – it had started off being addressed to a loving couple, but I couldn’t work out a quick way of having the voice speak to just the one or the other – the male/the guy/the man sounded too cold; the girl/the woman/the female, what was the right level of language? None of the above. And what was the partner supposed to be doing while the other was receiving instructions about the, er, other, as it were? I never even contemplated the mathematical complexity of structuring it for a same-sex couple. In the end, I hit on the idea of having the voice simply address the distaff side of the arrangement, and that solved that.
Any actual jokes were a long time coming, for which the credit must go to my soon-to-be old mucker Rob Orchard. “I liked ‘being careful not to poke him in the I,” he said. “Can’t you do a bit more of that?” So I added the line about buffing up his IQ, and “Now bring up your U’s to within an inch of his R’s.” Apart from that, what other parts of the body sound like letters? You tell me and I’ll stick it in. (I tried very hard to do something with ‘make sure his P doesn’t drop out’ – pee/drop, geddit? – but no dice.)
The sketch was written for A Room With a Revue, the very first show I was in, and I remember there was a lot of discussion as to how to actually present it. It’s called Radio Sex, but you couldn’t just turn the lights down and have a two-minute voiceover could you? Or rather, I suppose you could, but it’s not very visually appealing. Should we have people on stage acting it out then? Well maybe, but that would sort of kill the joke wouldn’t it? You were meant to be imagining it. So how about a big screen with moving silhouettes behind it, like a shadow play? Well yes, but similar sort of deal really, doing the audience’s job for them. I think someone even suggested we play it in the dark but add a soundtrack of weird sounds, like indistinct shrieks and fumblings and fleshy smacks and plugholes gurgling. That might have worked.
The stupid thing is, I can no longer remember how it was staged – that was the directors’ job, darling, nothing to do with me, I was just the writer – but I do know that staged it certainly was, because I remember feeling chagrinated at the fact my parents were in the audience and had to sit through the entire farrago of filth that was their son’s contribution. I never told them it was one of mine. I like to think they never even suspected it, though I bet my mother did. No fooling her. When I did finally bring a girlfriend home for the first time she cornered me in the kitchen and said, “You’re sleeping with her aren’t you?” It must have been my aura of exhausted relief that gave me away. That, and the big sloppy grin all over my F.