DATING & MATING – A WEEK ON HOOKING UP
★★★★
Sunday to Friday from 8.30pm, ABC2
If there was ever a reason to get the littlies into bed as soon as Shaun the Sheep retires to the barn at 7pm, it is ABC2's week of evening programs dedicated to sex – how to get it and how to get better at it – in the age of communication technology.
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The Today show's Aussiest interview ever, Kanye rants and leaves, it's music award season with the ARIAs and the AMAs and a new posthumous song from Prince.
The action starts on a fairly light-hearted note with the premiere of No Strings Attached (screening each night at 8.10pm), a five-to-seven-minute Crank Yankers-style puppet show featuring the voices of real people recounting their dating-app misadventures. From the Australian team behind Tales from Tinder, these are whimsical and sometimes sad vignettes that, ironically by removing the human physicality, express the humanity sometimes lost in the cyber-dating process.
In the opening episode, "existentialist" Josh (represented in puppet form as a blue donkey, not unlike Eeyore), recalls his one-sided romance with a Dutch tourist that led him to the other side of the world. The outcome allows the donkey to deliver this astute observation: "We can't all be alpha-males. There are only a few of them out there."
![<i>No Strings Attached</i> uses puppets to enact the stories of real people and their dating-app misadventures.](/web/20161128082931im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/x/z/s/2/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsrvln.png/1480303127176.jpg)
Along with some reheated programs that aren't strictly to theme, such as Amy Schumer's fabulously filthy live stand-up, Mostly Sex Stuff (Wednesday, 9.20pm), Louis Theroux: Swingers (Sunday, 8.30pm), and Luke McGregor's Luke Warm Sex (Friday, 9.10pm), there are some fascinating documentaries about what can and does go wrong when computers become the third party in the matchmaking process.
The Girl Who Became Three Boys (Sunday, 9.20pm) examines the bizarre case of a young British woman who posed as three separate male identities to seduce and physically assault her female teenage victims. Revenge Porn (Monday, 9.20pm) investigates the dark side of sexting, a phenomenon challenging a whole new generation and the law.
Putting all of this into stark contrast is The Gypsy Matchmaker (Wednesday, 8.30pm), which follows a Roma family in the UK observing traditional customs as they marry off their children. Quite what this has to do with the theme of the week is uncertain, unless it is to highlight an equally impersonal manner of courtship and how far we have – or haven't – come.
In terms of entire communities involving themselves in a couple's romantic life, aspects of The Gypsy Matchmaker don't seem much of a stretch from British live-sex show Sex Box 2 (Friday, 9.40pm). During that outlandish spectacle, couples, friends and strangers discuss in graphic detail with sex therapist Goedele Liekens, in front of a studio audience, what they would like to do to each other. They then disappear into a "sex box", fitted out with a "pillow cam" (which actually appears to be more of a "foot-of-the-bed-cam"), to try it out. After much jovial speculation between Liekens and host Steve Jones, who likes to pad out time by producing odd sex merchandise such as a rubber foot with a vagina moulded into the ankle, the flushed couple emerge to rate their experience.
![Amy Schumer in ABC special Mostly Sexy Stuff.](/web/20161128082931im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/y/f/8/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsrvln.png/1480303127176.jpg)
It's certainly a step on from the traditional dating show and makes Ten's recent Bachelor/ette and Seven's First Dates seem positively vanilla.
If less X-rated twists on the dating-show format appeal, there's a rerun of Sexy Beasts on Sunday at 10.35pm. To test the theory that inside beauty is just as appealing as the outer shell, participants are made up as sci-fi monsters before sitting down to a candlelit dinner.
![Luke McGregor in Luke Warm Sex.](/web/20161128082931im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/y/f/8/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsrvln.png/1480303127176.jpg)
Perhaps one of the most enticing programs in this week's line-up is nothing quite so titillating. On Thursday at 9.30pm, Triple J's Tom Tilley hosts Hack Live: Swipe Right, a forum in which young Australians share their thoughts and experiences, and discuss what dating and mating is like here and now.