GingerNinja.net

(Channel 4 - Tuesday 15 May 2007 @ 10pm)

Virgin School follows the emotional and physical journey of 26-year-old virgin James as he embarks on a unique four month course for sexually inexperienced men, in Amsterdam. Situated at Aquarion, an established ’school for love and leadership’, the course is designed by experienced professionals to boost his self confidence – both socially and sexually, and concludes with the opportunity for him to lose his virginity to one of the sex therapist coaches.

Explicit footage and mild titillation cannot hide the fact that this documentary is also tragically comic.

Discussing it with my wife, friends and colleagues we all immediately focused on the fact that when performing a strip tease for the woman he was about to lose his virginity to, James was seen wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt and two pairs of pants - white briefs with navy boxers on top if memory serves - before moving onto the way the programme portrayed him as a geek - a label I and many others actually embrace - by cutting to the Buffy posters and X-Files, Buffy & Babylon 5 video collection in his bedroom.

It is very easy to label this obviously quite nice young man as strange because what he is doing is to public, but he is also a product of environment and one should not gloss over the fact that James has had learning difficulties, was bullied at school and still does his paper round as his only means of income at the start of the programme due to the way he feels about himself, that his social awkwardness and belief that he will never be perceived as a true man until he loses his virginity all stem from the rough time he had as a teenager. It amused and saddened me to realise that James obviously still believed that everyone in his school was having sex at the age of 14 when in fact they were all simply lying about it - something a handful of us knew at the time and the rest of us actually realised by the time we really did start having sex around the time we all buggered off to Uni.

One thing you cannot avoid, however, is that James is….well…..doing it with women who are old enough to be his mum or worse granny *shudder*. Some of the scenes are quite graphic and often amusing or compelling in a car-crash TV kind of way - the literally toe curling orgasm scene immediately springs to mind complete with voice-over informing me that James has just experienced his first orgasm with someone else in the room. Really? How very lovely!

The epilogue kindly informs us that since the making of this programme James has gained enough confidence to secure a job in the local cinema (one of the top five geek favourite jobs if I am not mistaken), has not had any more sex and is looking for a girlfriend. Now, whether this programme allows him to secure a proper girlfriend or simply provide a contact point for James to meet all the women of a certain age who have incredibly high HRT fuelled sex drives that he can lay his hands on remains to be seen. Quite how Channel 4 got away with screening it begs belief but I am kind of glad they did. As for the pants, I think it was probably his first time wearing boxers which - as I remember it from when I was 14 - they can be strange to wear at first so he probably wanted to keep the security of his tighty whities.