Nine o'clock on a Sunday evening: the roast has been eaten, the homework hurriedly finished and the last notes of Songs of Praise have settled, like dust, over the lounges of the British Isles. The nation drifts into a contented semi-slumber as it flicks channels ready for the Forsyte Saga.
On Radio 1, meanwhile, they're discussing lesbian sex, internet dating, penis size, giving up weed, and shaving certain, rather delicate, areas of the anatomy. This is the Sunday Surgery, radio's answer to the problem page. It's a 50-50 combination of music and chat, interspersing eating disorders and puberty with So Solid, Dr Dre, and the Hives.
The format is simple. Listeners can call, text or email their problems into the show. Just two calls are set up before the show goes on air, meaning it depends on constant calls throughout the two hours. Each week there is a topical theme. This week, in honour of World Health Day, the theme is health and fitness. However, they never stick solely to the theme as listeners are free to phone in with whatever problem they might have.
The programme is presented by Emma B, a husky-voiced pocket rocket whose role is essentially one of "big sister", and Dr Mark Hamilton, whose medical expertise and Northern Irish lilt have proved one of the Sunday Surgery's major attractions. The programme also has four women answering the phones, watching out for hoax calls and suicidal callers. There are back-up, off-air lines, and those manning the phones are trained to point callers in the right direction, towards helplines and help groups. Every email sent is answered, and, if they give a phone number, they get called too. "I think everyone knew that when they started the programme they were opening a can of worms," says Emma. "And you can't do that without providing a proper support network."
The show has been a huge success since it started in 1999. Its core audience is aged 15-24, and approximately half the calls come from boys. There is also a website, where the discussion boards are plastered with tales of self-harm, bullying and depression. Yet parents have been scandalised by both the language and the graphic nature of some of the calls, alarmed by frank discussions about ecstasy and underage sex, not to mention Emma unblushingly describing how to masturbate your girlfriend.
However, the show is clearly answering a desperate need for advice among teenagers. To a certain degree, the figures speak for themselves. By the age of 16, 30% of boys and 26% of girls have had sexual intercourse. For every thousand 13-15 year-old girls, nearly nine become pregnant, and 53% of these pregnancies end in termination. Cases of Chlamydia have doubled over the past six years and an estimated 9% of sexually active women under 25 are thought to be infected. By 16, just one third of teenagers have never smoked and up to 50% have tried drugs. Every day, two young people commit suicide in the UK and Ireland and three young people an hour self-harm, a figure which is double that of 25 years ago.
"Self-harm is the subject we get the most calls and emails about," says Jane Graham, the programme's producer. "And we got an unbelievable number of calls about Will Young coming out. They do fret a lot about sexual health. But they seem to be quite aware. For example, they know what colour semen should be, and if it changes, they recognise there might be something wrong. Quite often they've seen it on the TV - on Hollyoaks or EastEnders."
Dr Aidan Macfarlane is also au fait with the worries of teenagers, as he is co-author of The Diary of a Teenage Health Freak. Following the success of the Health Freak books (over 500,000 sold worldwide), they set up a website to act as a sort of "virtual surgery" which has had some six million hits, about 40% of which are boys. "About a quarter of the problems are on sexual matters," says Macfarlane, "and then there's body image, puberty, divorce, bullying ... Increasingly they are worried about STDs - about Chlamydia and AIDS. But it's interesting that teen worries are always about getting on with the opposite sex. It doesn't matter which generation or what country they're from."
What both the Sunday Surgery and the Health Freak books have in common is their frankness and their colloquial tone. "We use schoolyard slang," says Graham. "We're quite straight-talking. We'll use the word 'bollocks'. We'll talk about blow jobs." Teenagers seem to respond to this approach more than the text-book terminology or the patronising tones of many adults. Macfarlane's attitude is pretty similar. "Sue Townsend's books had just come out and we decided to do something a bit like that," he explains, referring to Townsend's hugely successful Adrian Mole series. "We realised teenagers didn't read books about health. So we invented this character, Peter Payne, who is a hypochondriac. We decided to do the books as a sort of Trojan horse."
But shouldn't teenagers be going to their parents or their doctors about these kinds of problems, or indeed, shouldn't they be getting this kind of advice at school? "At least 50% of our listeners say, 'I can't talk to anyone about this, not friends, not parents, and please don't tell me to go to the doctor,' " says Graham. "On a very basic level, there's a massive misconception about patient confidentiality," Emma explains, "especially for under-16s. And a doctor's surgery is an exposed place, you might walk in and see someone you know."
"The books and the internet are non-moralistic. Although Personal Health and Social Education teaching is improving," says Macfarlane, who was once in charge of health education in schools throughout Oxford, "but it's still left up to the individual schools. We need sex education to begin before sexual activity. And sexual activity is different to sexual intercourse, it starts around 12 or 13. We need to teach young people to use the terms penises, vaginas and clitorises and just be entirely up front and honest about it. But teachers get embarrassed, and children pick up on that."
Embarrassment is a major factor. We all recall blushing furiously as we were asked to put condoms on bananas in sex education lessons, never mind our parents attempts to talk nonchalently about sex and puberty. The radio's advantage is its anonymity. "We all know that teenagers are meant to be having sex left, right and centre, but talking about it is more difficult than actually doing it," says Emma. "And I don't think parents or teachers encourage it. There's still a lot of that English prudishness." For a lot of young people it's about saving face. One caller to the show wanted to know what a 69 was, because her boyfriend had asked to try it, but she had no idea what to do. She felt she couldn't ask him, or her friends, in case she appeared uncool.
Many of the callers change their names to further increase their anonymity. "It's funny what pseudonyms people choose," Mark observes. This week, among calls about weight loss and bodybuilding, we find 'David' who is worried he has a low sperm count. His mates claim that when they ejaculate "loads comes out" but David only gets "a few drops". He says it's embarrassing around girls. "He has nothing to worry about," says Mark. "The average ejaculation is about 5ml, but ejaculation is not related to sperm count."
Sarah', meanwhile is concerned that she might have diabetes. "I haven't been to my doctor," she says. "I don't feel comfortable with my doctor." Emma is bullish: "If you don't feel comfortable with your doctor, go and find another one. Do it. Do it for me and Mark." Later, Emma explains how her role is to give "the kind of advice I give to my best friend. I'm there to say, 'Mate, don't worry about it!', and I think a lot of the time that's all a lot of the people who call in need."
Some of the calls concern serious issues such as suicide and child abuse, but equally, they receive calls about seemingly trivial matters, such as the foolishness of shaving your bikini line. "We never take the piss. Ever." says Graham. "You have to try and remember what it was like". But sometimes they are startled by the levels of knowledge among their young callers "I'm actually surprised at the level of maturity of a lot of teenagers," says Mark. "There just seems to be a level of self-confidence. I suppose it's due to better educational standards, that adverts are aimed more and more at teenagers, the age of communication making it easier to get information, and the previous reluctance to admit that young people are just less experienced adults."
"I really strongly believe that if you start thinking kids are different now, or it's worse, the more dangerous it is," Emma warns. "And I don't know where you aportion blame in these circumstances. The more we think it's different from when we were young, the further they get away from us."
www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/djs/sunday_surgery.shtml
www.teenagehealthfreak.org
