In Sex Education, Gillian Anderson plays the kind of couples therapist you definitely won’t find down at the offices of Relate, wearing a fluffy sweater and statement earrings. What I mean is that in addition to her fondness for one-night stands and the fact she is apt to ask her clients some pretty out-there questions in precisely the same voice that she might use to order an Americano – “Marjorie, how are you getting on with your penis?” – Dr Jean is also in possession of what seems to me (innocent-face emoji) to be a quite magnificent collection of dildos. One of these, hanging on her consulting room wall as if it were just a decorative plate or her degree certificate, is carved from wood and so long she could certainly use it as a walking stick were she ever to suffer a bad sprain of the ankle. Others, arranged in rows in her drawers like so many T-shirts, are made from rubber and so… wide that at first I took them (even-more-innocent-face emoji) for jelly moulds.
If all this has piqued your interest, please, be calm. This isn’t really Anderson’s show. Sex Education is basically a comedy about randy sixth-formers – think The Inbetweeners, only 10,000 times less funny – one of whom happens to be Dr Jean’s geeky son, Otis (Asa Butterfield). When the series opens, Otis feels nothing but embarrassment about his mother, especially after the school bully sends a clip to everyone’s mobiles of her briskly masturbating an aubergine on television. However, things are about to change. The information Ma has doled out to him so incontinently down the years will shortly come into its own. Maeve (Emma Mackey), the school’s resident gorgeous, pouting bad girl, noticed his exceptionally adult empathy when the aforementioned school bully took three Viagra and thought his dick would explode – Otis talked to him calmly from the next door lavatory cubicle until the inflationary crisis had passed – and has now decided to put him to work. He’ll sort out the students’ sexual problems; she’ll invoice them for the service.
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