Sex causes confusion, Cleese causes laughs

Press, 25 May 1977, Page 19

Sex causes confusion, Cleese causes laughs

By

A. K. GRANT

Sex reared its far-from-ugly but occasionally puzzling head in two of the three programmes I watched on Monday night. In “Warship” we saw Nialls and Beaumont grappling with and occasionally boarding their respective birds, neither of whom wanted to be a sailor’s wife. At the end Beaumont rather snobbishly suggested that Nialls’s lady was not quite out of the top drawer, which I though was a bit impertinent for a first Lieutenant, even, though he be the son of a RearAdmiral. And anyway, since when have the women with whom Royal Navy captains consoled themselves been required to have impeccable connections? Lady Hamilton, in spite of being married to a Sir, was not received in all the best houses, but that didn’t hold Nelson back. And as for some of the women Sir Francis Drake consorted with, well really. Sex, or rather the mention of it, occurred in a more confusing context in “Dateline Monday,” when the Minister of Social Welfare (Mr Bert Walker) was being questioned by Lindsay Perigo about the proposed cuts in the Domestic Purposes Benefit. At some {joint in the interview Mr Walker denied that sex was used as a determinant of a de facto relationship and went on to point out that there was little or no sex in many marriages. Perigo did not follow this up, presumably because he could not work out what on earth the

Minister was talking about. Nor. initially, could I: it is hard to see, at first sight, what the blight of sexless marriages which has plagued New Zealand since at least (on my figures) 1873 has to do" with

the question of whether a separated wife should be supported by her husband or her boy-friend. But 1 think I have got on to it now. What the Minister meant was that since many married men have

to support their wives without receiving any sex in return, de facto husbands should face up manfully to the same obligation. even though their marriages are de facto in name only. (Somebody ought to invent a term for the sexless de facto marriage: I put forward “de frustrate.") No doubt there are those who would agree with the Minister, and the interview was certainly an interesting clue to his thinking. The question I raise is this: What about all those thousands of couples up and down the country who not onlv don’t have any sex, but don’t even know each other? I commend them to the Minister's attention. There was little or no sex in “Faw’lty Towers,” but there was no need for any. Britain was famous in the fifties for its Angrv Young Men, but in any decade the country has always harboured far more examples of a species which could perhaps be described as the Angry British Misfit. John Cleese captured the type to perfection. I do not propose to analyse the programme in order to isolate the elements which make it funny, an exercise which I have always thought is rather like pulling up a flower to see how the roots are getting on. But the programme is incredibly funny, and could be used for the treatment of depression under the name of H.C.T. (Hilario — Convulsive — Therapy).