'Wanderlust'

'Wanderlust' is a new BBC series peopled by the obligatory, tiresomely cute, knowing, metropolitan types who communicate relentlessly in wisecracks and smartarserie and are oh so at ease talking about sex (the programme has scenes of a sexual nature from the beginning and throughout). The curious thing is the way that these BBC liberal types separate out the business of sex and the business of relationship. The latter is conducted relentlessly via the increasingly sterile, wisecracking side of their personas. So intent are they on sustaining this that they never notice that sex and its uncomplicated animal attraction is the actual vehicle through which relationship is normally conducted between the, er, sexes. My guess is that to concede this would be to place something that they are, in truth and in their high-mindedness, rather embarrassed by, above their self-regarding intellects. Programmes like this treat sex as an intellectually remote object for clinical study rather than as a part of our nature inseparable from what we are. They try to assert the ascendancy of the merely cerebral over the heart.