It is important to acknowledge that, in Naked Attraction (Wednesdays, 10pm, Channel 4), the producers have created a show designed to make me hold my palms bone-to-the-eyes and shout: “OH, JESUS GOD” whenever literally any second of action happens.
Slow reveal of six ancient penises, stirring mutely like naked mole rats dropped on a barber’s shop floor? Oh, Jesus God. Host Anna Richardson turning sideface and saying: “Would you have a go on that?” like a Blue Peter presenter about to get stuck into some PVA glue? Oh, Jesus God. Three naked British people – naked! They have no clothes on! – sincerely praising each other’s bodies, standing there with the casual air of a half-forced smoking area chat, drily saying: “She has lovely boobs”? Oh, Jesus God. When I die I am going to hell, and when I go there I will be met by a file of nude people, every one of them sporting a crotch tattoo slightly overgrown with about four days’ worth of pubic hair, and I’ll have to stare them all in the eyes and go: “Yeah. It’s … interesting. I can see myself … I can definitely see myself going down there.” Every day for ever, until the abyss takes me.
So Naked Attraction is back. The thing with Naked Attraction is it didn’t really go away – in three years it’s managed four series, with this now the fifth – but it does seem to have quietly ramped up the sheer naked attractionness of it. We always knew Naked Attraction was on, quietly being naked, but now we really know about it. This is in no small part due to episode two’s Judith – a 57-year-old Christian breast cancer survivor and unrelenting horndog who went viral after uttering the words: “I love feet. I love to feel somebody’s toes round my pussy, or kitty.”
Despite this, Naked Attraction is … oddly wholesome? It is a show where six people slowly reveal their raw, wonky nakedness to each other while Anna Richardson officiates like a visiting assembly church pastor. But it works, somehow, never straying into Geordie Shore venereal nudity, never zagging towards a waxed and lean Love Island nakedness. Naked Attraction is nakedness as humanity – old, young, large, small, hairy, plucked – and it is curiously heartening. Watching these people (and where do they find these people? “All right hiya. Want to get your full penis out on television? One-in-six chance you’ll get chosen for a date. Actually quite high risk you’ll get your entire piece out and have to go home first, alone, in a dressing gown, and when we broadcast this all your mates will see your balls plus shaft, in full, for no reason at all. No appearance fee. Shoot on a weekday so you’ll have to book a day off work to do it. You in or you out?”), who seem entirely galvanised and freed by the experience, gazing at one another with lustless, staring eyes.
The hit rate, for a TV dating show, is bizarrely high, too: couched as science, Naked Attraction really does have a pretty good record for lasting relationships at the three-week check-in point. Which is to say: it makes my entire body want to turn inside out every single second I watch of it. It makes me want to scream so hard I die. But on the whole, Naked Attraction – and the nudity within it – is a force for good.
