The British Family - Sex

Kirsty Young looks at how British families have changed since the Second World War by exploring the impact of the sexual revolution, combining her encounters with ordinary British families with the sex-soaked film archive of the time. She describes how the 1970s were the real moment when the sexual revolution took hold of Britain and looks into the explosion of sexual imagery and ideas Britons were exposed to. Examining how they affected traditional family values, she shows how the desire for sexual liberation was tested in the early 1980s when the first cases of AIDS reported in the UK steadily mushroomed into warnings that every British household would be affected. Kirsty examines how the emerging Women's Movement radically challenged old ideas about the family, about who does what and why in the typical family setup. She meets some of the women for whom the ideas of feminism meant a revolution in their families, and those for whom nothing really changed.