Women's sex lives in lockdown prove online comedy hit

A groundbreaking new comedy sketch show based on women’s sex lives during lockdown, starring Aimee Lou Wood and Miriam Margolyes, is designed to “claim the stage” for women, its co-creator, Joanna Scanlan, says.

Sex Lives, believed to be the first interactive comedy backed by the BBC’s commercial wing, BBC Studios, documents stories submitted anonymously by women and has proved a hit online.

Following the #MeToo movement, Scanlan, who acted in The Thick of It, said she had “been thinking for a long time about trying to get a conversation around women’s sexuality into the open, into the mainstream. It always ends up being to the side, to the edge.”

She came up with the idea after buying the rights to Wendy Jones’s book The Sex Lives of English Women, and began developing a series with her fellow No Offence star Alex Roach and the writer and director Jenny Duffy.

When lockdown happened they decided to set up a website appealing for anonymous female sexual experiences, and to use some of the money given to Scanlan’s BBC Studios-backed company George & George to invent characters around the submissions, film them and put them out on Instagram.

Filmed via Zoom, each linked tale features two actors discussing their experiences of sex during the pandemic, with one character taking a naked photo each day. In another, a character played by Scanlan reveals to her aunt, played by Margolyes, that she is in a lesbian, “light bondage” polyamorous relationship.

Sex Lives has proved particularly popular with young women, netting around 300,000 viewers on the Instagram account of Wood, star of Sex Education. The team are now working on a longer version for television, potentially on BBC3 or one of the streaming services.

Scanlan said it had “been a genuine dialogue with the public” and that lawyers were consulted throughout the process to make sure no one who had submitted a story could be identified. To her surprise hardly any fake stories were sent in, with the most popular topic being masturbation, “of course, as people were separated”.

Designed as a record of women’s sex lives in 2020, as well as a comedy, Sex Lives also features graphics such as emojis and stickers and represented a new “freer”, more immediate way of making comedy, Scanlan said. “There’s something I find very exciting about challenging the form.”

One of the reasons she asked Margolyes to take part was they were both in Footlights at Cambridge University “and both of us had quite difficult experiences there”. She added: “It was, how did I fit in as a comedic woman fit into this really fusty structure which would not bend to any of my interests?”

She recalled writing a sketch at the time about sexuality during a sex education lesson in a children’s bookshop and said “everyone was like, ‘Oh I don’t think we should be talking about that kind of thing’. So it was a slight healing experience; here we are in a new form of sketch comedy.

“We’re kind of claiming the stage in a way because we can grab the means of production in the way we couldn’t do at … Cambridge University with all of the weight of patriarchy on our heads.”

Wood said what she loved about Sex Lives was, “it shows what magic can happen when a judgment-free space is created”.

She said: “When it comes to sex we often keep these stories locked away due to shame or embarrassment. Or perhaps because we don’t trust that our vulnerability will be respected or handled with care. It’s pure joy when you can reveal the most intimate and ‘embarrassing’ parts of yourself and know they will be loved and celebrated. The women in this series listen to, support and encourage each other to explore how varied and wonderful sex can be in 2020.”

Related: From neighbourly romances to Zoom sex: the boom in lockdown erotica

She said the fact the stories came from real people’s lives, “creates a connection between actor and viewer which feels very special and unique”.

The most interesting revelation for her co-star Susan Wokoma – whose character Nyome favours risky Covid hook-ups – was that “that lockdown hasn’t stopped sexual exploration”.

She said the new way of working was also liberating: “The idea of there being ‘traditional’ comedy, sketch, storytelling – anything – is becoming extinct. What is traditional? Who decided these parameters? Artists have power in telling their own stories because there aren’t just five terrestrial channels run by five very similar people.”

Hundreds of stories were sent in to the Sex Lives website, Scanlan said, but she, Duffy and Roach are now appealing for even more to make future episodes.