Sex Education series 2 review – splendidly bingeworthy

Something that American television and cinema has always done much better than the British equivalent is the high school comedy. From American Pie to Election, via Saved by the Bell and Mean Girls, there is a long and often hilarious tradition in the United States that finds no corresponding success here. If one wanted to be provocative, one could cite If…, Lindsay Anderson’s surreal Sixties masterpiece, and at a push Andrew Lincoln’s early Noughties series Teachers had aspects of the genre, but it remains largely untapped. Until now, with the advent of Laurie Nunn’s glorious Sex Education, which has returned for its second series on Netflix.

The first series of the show focused largely on the sexually repressed Otis (Asa Butterfield), whose inhibitions are contrasted to great comic effect with the blasé openness of his sex therapist mother Jean (the sublime Gillian Anderson, who with this and her forthcoming performance as Margaret Thatcher in series four of The Crown is almost becoming Netflix’s go-to star). Ironically enough, he ends up offering sex therapy to his classmates, with the assistance of his bored, brilliant classmate Maeve (Emma Mackey), a social pariah who lives by herself in a trailer park, her mother having absconded. It concluded with Maeve realising that she was in love with Otis, but by this time he had begun a fumbling relationship of sorts with Ola (Patricia Allison), the daughter of his mother’s boyfriend.

Thus the second series begins with Otis unexpectedly enjoying a belated sexual awakening (cue an extremely amusing montage of him masturbating in the most unlikely of places, and climaxing, if that’s the right word, with an outrageous moment involving Anderson) while Maeve has quit school and is being pursued by her feckless mother trying to make amends (Anne-Marie Duff, in the definition of luxury casting). Otis’s best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) is being pursued, to his confused joy, by a taciturn but handsome French transfer student, Ola is dissatisfied by her boyfriend’s sexual technique, and the repressed, permanently fed-up headmaster Mr Groff (Alistair Petrie) has his own problems to deal with, mainly involving his ne’er-do-well son Adam, whose bullying of Eric in the first season was eventually revealed to be a blind masking his own sexual confusion, a subplot carried on here.

There is a lot more going on, to generally hilarious but also poignant effect. It’s a particular pleasure to see the excellent Jim Howick have more to do as the useless teacher Mr Hendricks, whose surreal attempts at talking dirty to his girlfriend (“I’m going to ruin your life…I’m going to get you fired”) produce startled yelps of hysterical mirth, but this is a programme that revolves around its young cast. The particular genius of Nunn and her co-writers is to switch between surreal humour and moments of deep seriousness with alacrity, sometimes even in the same scene. If there is nothing that quite compares in terms of emotional impact to the stand-out episode in the first series when Maeve goes to get an abortion, a sub-plot concerning the ever-effervescent Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) being the victim of sexual assault on a bus, and the subsequent fallout from that, is a timely and chilling reminder of the psychological damage that apparently small acts can cause.

The setting remains as surreal as ever. Perhaps because of the huge amounts of American money being pumped into the show, this is an odd cross between California and Britain, where the students have English accents but the school looks as if it could have been transplanted from the West Coast, and where Jean and Otis live in a grand house with panoramic views over lush greenery (filmed, as much of the series is, in the Wye Valley and Wales). Yet expecting social realism from this programme is a pointless endeavour. The world depicted here is one that is about as woke as it could possibly be, with the school’s sporting star being not only black but brought up by his (decidedly conservative) lesbian mothers, and where the diversity of the student body is simply presented as an unremarkable fact. As, of course, it would be within just about any comprehensive secondary school today. The music choices are spot on (it’s never not going to be good to hear Air’s timeless Sexy Boy or the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes again) and the whole caboodle adds up to another splendidly bingeworthy Netflix show.

If one is going to carp, then there is a persistent sense that the American influences dominate, and that this would be more or less the same if it was transplanted to the United States, no doubt with Anderson still part of the cast. But this seems like nit-picking, and the touches of British humour that permeate the script, thanks to Nunn and her co-writers, bring the bizarre world agreeably to life. A greater problem for me is that Butterfield, in the lead role, remains something of a twitchy blank, outmatched by his charming and interesting co-stars, especially the brilliant Mackey and the ever-charming Gatwa. Yet this is ultimately an ensemble piece, and the return of one of Netflix’s most purely enjoyable shows is something to be welcomed with open arms – and, given the priapic nature of most of the characters, open legs as well.