What's the Problem with Nudity? Tuesday 9pm, BBC2

Posted by Stewart Turner

What's the problem with nudity? “What’s the problem with nudity?” asked the boffins at BBC2 on last night’s episode of science show Horizon. Well, clearly not a great deal if the producers of this show are anything to go by. The BBC cameramen had a veritable field day with the eight hapless volunteers in an, er highly scientific study, waltzing them up and down the stairs of a terraced house to maximise the effect of gravity on their various wobbly bits. It’s enough to put you off your serious science documentary.

And therein lay the problem. At the heart of the show, there was a seriously important scientific conundrum. Why is it we humans have developed a penchant for wearing purple loon pants and gold lamé jumpsuits when all of God’s other fair creatures romp around naked as the day they were born? Well, Charles Darwin put it all down to sexual selection, and asserted that we’re instinctively attracted to the less hirsute of our fellow mankind for a mate. Something ladies of a certain age with a thing for Sean Connery might want to dispute, perhaps.

Anyway, despite all this, there’s a lack of experimental evidence to support Darwin’s theory. Or there was, until an eager Finnish professor decided to see if shaving a bunch of his male compatriots’ chests would render them more attractive to women. And lo and behold, it did. Reach for those razors, chaps.

Similarly intriguing was a section about the Patas monkeys, a bunch of primates who sweat in a remarkably similar way to us humans. Eggheads reckon that the Patas are following our very own pattern of evolution, and offer an insight into the time man first started to lose his fur.

All very interesting, but back to our volunteers. It has to be said locking up eight eager members of the public and finding out that they feel a little awkward when asked to take each other’s knickers off is hardly science, is it? To be honest I was less interested in the results of the experiment than in what their colleagues might say to them at work this morning.

Or maybe I’ve just got a problem with nudity…

Published on Orange.co.uk

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