There is an obvious progression here. How we all used to stutter with tense disbelief when the 'ordinary couples' had their made-over rooms revealed to them in Changing Rooms. Lucky them, we used to think. I wish that could happen to me! Now we are on the edge of our seats watching while some hapless mother allows her four-year-old whack her sixmonth-old over the head with a meat mallet under the head-shaking supervision of a TV nanny.

On Tuesday night this kind of programming reached an all-time low when James, a 26-year-old paper boy who lives with his parents in a soulless English suburb, was taken to some wacky sex clinic in Amsterdam to lose his virginity. We watched as James was coaxed into sex over a three-month period by three matronly-looking "sex counsellors" old enough to be his mother.

It was painful, compelling viewing and markedly unsexy. These women were not prostitutes but dingly-dangly therapist types and their methods involved the sprinkling of essential oils, learningabout-your-body massage in a "motherly" way (eugh! ), lots of miscellaneous tugging about and some which was not nearly miscellaneous enough.

By far the low point was familiarising complete ingenue James with the female "privates". (They did not use the word "vagina", which was strange. Maybe they felt that was too much information. ) They did this through a black-and-white illustration, which my husband described . . . with admirable accuracy . . . as looking like a "fruit bat".

James's white-haired counsellor then pulled up her skirt and James was invited to have a good look for himself at the real thing. I found this excruciating but my husband said that, for technical reasons, he thought it was rather a good idea.

As we followed James from a very sad, painfully shy, newspaper-delivering virgin into a slightly more hopeful, more confident paper boy who had had sexual intercourse, I just thought how exploitative and screwed up we are to be glued to the private parts . . . inside and, in this case, out . . . of this fellow human being. At one point the gravitasladen voice of the narrator (after all, this was not mere titillation but a serious 'documentary') asked James how he felt about being in the programme.

Did he worry what other people thought of him?

"No, " James asserted, "I am doing this for myself."

Or rather, the TV company were doing this for him in return for all the gory details captured on film. It would be interesting to know who the researchers found first . . . the virgin in need of help or the nutty sex-counselling clinic in Amsterdam.

Despite this, by the end of the programme James had retained his dignity. Because in his candour and his willingness to expose himself . . .

literally and physically . . . he perhaps deserves more respect than those of us who cling to our privacy as if we are something special. Who hide our weaknesses and are afraid to present our vulnerabilities to the world. In that sense James had more courage than most so perhaps we all have something to learn from a man willing to lose his virginity on television. Although, cynically, I doubt that was the producer's intention.