The Opposite of Sex

Of the many losses sustained by John Leslie following the murky allegations about his past, probably the least upsetting was that he was dropped from the This Morning calendar. For those of you who favour the plain desk diary, or won't let anything on to your walls that doesn't feature the phrase "a dog for all seasons", you may be unfamiliar with the form. Various well-liked presenters, male and female, take their clothes off. None of them is what you'd call flawless in its warts and all state, but that, I think, is the point. The women tend to be placed on a burgundy chaise longue with gold twiddly bits, of the kind that schoolchildren who have heard of Madame de Pompadour think that Madame de Pompadour would have had. Something is draped over their privates which - depending on their size and shape - might be a bunch of grapes, or flowers, or maybe a great big duvet. Newspapers who have spent the whole year saying Naomi Campbell has cellulite will have an attack of yuletide benevolence and call the presenter "curvy" and a "sex kitten" when she is clearly nothing of the sort.

The male presenters, also quite naked (I need this to be absolutely clear), are more likely to be photographed in a kitchen, their privates obscured by a hilarious kitchen item, like a colander. John Leslie was meant to be mooning from beneath a kilt worn in the traditional way, before that became a bit, well, inappropriate.

This year is, in fact, This Morning's first calendar of the sort, but it has some well-established precedents, including a Women's Institute version of 12 quite naked females, who all looked a bit like This Morning presenters, engaged in "female" pursuits (these included flower arranging, embroidery and - my favourite touch - two separate portraits for the weighing and mixing stages of the baking process).

Meanwhile, for well-loved presenters who feel a bit squeamish about nudity, there is always that hoary classic, the 55-year-old man in fishnet tights. This year it was Michael Buerk, for the Children in Need appeal, but I think I've seen every male over 40 in televisual media do this (apart from, obscurely, Angus Deayton).

And really, I thought there was nothing interesting under the sun about the Christmas season, that it was all just about getting drunk and succumbing to your irreducible human urge to amass pointless, shiny items. But this aspect of the year's end really is weird, and says something if not sinister, at least pretty icky, about the relationship between mainstream British culture and sexuality.

I 'm forgetting the main impulse behind all this, which is charitable. I feel utterly sceptical about the moneyspinning potential of this home counties erotica, but when they say "charity" they don't really mean "money" - it's just a way to transform titillation into respectability, to press sex into the service of social responsibility, in manifest defiance of what sex is supposed to be all about. Furthermore, for all the seaside postcard sauciness of the poses, you never get real lookers appearing in these calendars and galas, and that's not because there is any shortage of lookers in broadcasting as a whole (though there might, granted, be a shortage of lookers in the WI). No, you get your Buerks, your Fern Brittens, your nice, sturdy individuals who cannot take their clothes off in public and take themselves seriously at the same time. So, it's very clearly in the spirit of self-parody, and self-parody - along with all other branches of heightened self-awareness - is the opposite of sex. But it is more than self-parody by the mingers concerned, it's a satire on the entire nudey calendar genre. Underneath the wholesome good humour, there is a definite whiff of a no-nonsense nanny doing a vicious impression of a whining child to give it a sense of how silly it's being. "You may think you look like raw sex in a vest (well, actually, not in a vest), you girls on the Pirelli calendar," This Morning's approach says, "but try looking at it in a different way. Try being embarrassed for a change. You'll never look back."

There is also a curious gender divide going on. While the nudey women are meant to look ridiculous, the integrity of their gender is still intact - you don't find them covering their privates with pit helmets, for instance. Men, on the other hand, are always feminised by the stripping process. The modesty props are always things like fishnets, aprons, kitchen utensils, kilts (for which read "skirt"). The rank absurdity of men made vulnerable by wearing no clothes has to be foregrounded by female baubles, as if we might get the wrong idea, and think they were seriously enjoying themselves.

All told, this is throwback imagery. It centres on the unending hilarity of cross-dressing, the safe, asexual, country kitchen sight of a dumpy lady under a blanket, the unbreachable manliness of a man in an apron who's removed his undercrackers for a good cause. This is a view of the body dating back to a time when sex was still a bit dirty and edgy, before it took its place at the very fulcrum of culture. And people still buy it. We're weird.