Virgin Island is the most uncomfortable TV I’ve ever seen ...Middle East

I thought Channel 4 had lost the ability to shock me. Whether it’s sending right-wingers across the Channel in dinghies to emulate the refugee experience in Go Back to Where You Came From, or asking Vicky Pattison to create her own deepfake sex tape, there’s no boundary the broadcaster won’t push, no line it won’t step over – to varying degrees of success. But with its latest “experiment”, Virgin Island, I fear Channel 4 has finally gone too far.

The seven-part series invites 12 adult “virgins” to a retreat in Croatia where they will work on their “intimacy issues” with sex experts who have the ultimate aim of helping them have sex. A reality series dressed up as a therapy session, it’s all billowing beige tents, “breathwork” and earnest conversations about touch and shame – no one ever speaks louder than a whisper. If it sounds like a holistic, worthwhile endeavour, then the reality is altogether more disturbing. In reality, it’s an icky, uncomfortable sexperiment that puts its already vulnerable participants through visibly upsetting scenarios.

The first indication that something is deeply wrong with the series comes during the virgins’ first group therapy. After some rather intense breathing exercises which end up sounding a lot like sexualised moans, “somatic sexologist” Danielle Harel invites a fellow therapist to pin her against a wall and hold her hands over her head. It’s a rather porn-like move and, unsurprisingly, it makes quite a few of the virgins giggle in their discomfort. But one, 23-year-old Emma, breaks down into tears.

This makes what happens next that bit harder to watch. In Emma’s one-to-one session with an older, male sex therapist, Emma is encouraged to test her boundaries of touch. She puts on a brave face, and invites him to touch her on the knee, then further up her thigh before ending the meeting. I’d like to think that the Virgin Island producers took all the necessary steps to protect their participants’ well-being and that willing consent was front and centre at all times. But even with the knowledge that Emma was there of her own volition, watching a therapist in a position of power slide his hand up a young girl’s thigh while she visibly squirms makes for unpleasant TV.

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Channel 4 documentaries have lost the plot again

Virgin Island misses crucial context to understand why these young people (the oldest participant, Ben, is 30) are so keen to lose their virginity. There is zero discussion about the very concept of virginity – that it is a social construct with no biological merit; that it has sexist, misogynistic roots; that it is a stick of shame with which to beat people. In fact, the programme only reinforces the idea that being a virgin is a bad thing, a problem to correct by virtue of its very existence.

Even when the virgins aren’t teary, and are more enthusiastic about improving their intimacy skills, Virgin Island remains unpleasant. Twenty-eight-year-old delivery driver Zac shows so much willing that he is soon fast-tracked to a session with a “surrogate partner” – a sort of specialist sex teacher who “uses her own body” to make her clients comfortable with sexual touch and beyond. If Zac wants to, she will go all the way with him.

Thankfully, Zac stops the session at stroking each other’s arms, but snippets of future episodes confirm that Virgin Island will, in fact, go as far as showing the virgins actually having sex for the first time. And therein lies the real problem with the series. Any pretense of trying to “help” or therapise the participants is immediately undermined by the presence of cameras. If they struggle to have the confidence to have sex with someone they know, in private, how on Earth are they expected to be intimate with a stranger in front of the nation?

As with most Channel 4 “experiments”, Virgin Island is deliberately controversial television that only pretends to engage with serious social issues. I can only hope that the participants gained something positive from the experience and are being looked after as their most intimate moments are broadcast on national television. Because Virgin Island isn’t just outrageous entertainment – it’s morally reprehensible.

‘Virgin Island’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4

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