Letter: Nasty pleasures

Sir: Terence Blacker's perceptive "It's brutal, it's selfish, it's sex today" (Review, 23 February) provided a timely analysis of the increasingly obsessive preoccupation by TV drama makers to challenge and cross all the boundaries of sexual behaviour, both heterosexual and homosexual.

Channel 4's "Queer as Folk" on 23 February was a case in point. The first of an eight-part drama on the lives and loves of three homosexual men, it starts with a 29-year-old man picking up a boy of 15 - itself a criminal offence. What follows has been described as the most graphic sex scenes shown on TV. I believe that this and several other current drama series undermine the values that are vital for the health and strengthening of our society.

Sex is a beautiful but fragile gift from God. Its exploitation or trivialisation often leads to emptiness and disillusion-ment. But that, of course, is rarely admitted and explored. To do so would explode the fantasy. Integrity and truth so easily become expendable.

Terence Blacker is right ... "somewhere along the line something has changed and the age-old search for pleasure has turned nasty".

+JOHN CHELMSFORD

Margaretting,

Essex