‘Naughty rather than dirty’: 50 years of Man About the House, the sitcom that introduced sex to British TV

According to Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis, “sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three.” But sex in peak-time television did not start – and, then, only fumblingly and furtively – until 1973. On 15 August that year, ITV premiered the sitcom Man About the House.

Its writer Brian Cooke had seen a few adverts in the flat shares section of the Evening Standard specifying “a male or female” flatmate. The phrasing was striking, as the convention at the time was for rentals being single-sex and, by heterosexual assumption, therefore no sex. Carla Lane’s The Liver Birds, which debuted on BBC One in 1969, featured two young women sharing.

“I suggested a mixed flat-sharing comedy,” recalls Cooke, 85, who, with his writing partner, Johnnie Mortimer, had an office and annual contract with the London-based ITV company Thames. The network was keen but nervous. “Sex was the problem we had. Because the powers that be at Thames said: ‘This is about sex, isn’t it?’ and we