Looser Women

Karen Dunbar is the solitary saving grace in a show that mistakes rehashing tired clichés about the mating game for being risqué.

Taking the format of a panel discussion show presented by a trio of game girls—Wendy Wason and Rachel Parris being our other two hosts—Looser Women is a based on a pair of books by authors purporting to lift the lid on Britain’s hidden sexual mores: Tim Fountain’s Sex Addict and Suzanne Portnoy’s erotic memoir The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker.

Material lifted from true confessions by members of the public around the country is inevitably funnier and stranger than anything that could be made-up. Stories range from the weirdly kinky (including “Marie fae Govan” who gets her backside whacked with a fish slice) to the depressingly mundane (a list of locations people have enjoyed a causal quickie includes a skip outside Lidl). And any routine featuring a bowl full of dildos in varying exotic shapes and applications (a “potpourri of dildi” as Dunbar puts it) is always going to raise a snigger on the most basic level of humour. But in an age when practically every men’s and women’s magazine carries a sex column revelling in its readiness to call a spade a spade in matters carnal, there’s precious little that’s daring or enlightening about the bulk of the gags in this show.

It’s Dunbar’s razor sharp comic mannerisms, impressions and timing alone that raise solid laughs, in such a way as to make Wason look stilted and Parris—in her defence, the youngest and least experienced of the three—positively out of her depth.