Wanderlust, BBC One review ★★★★★

Sex. It doesn't always look like those honey-lit scenes in films. Unhappily, life almost never includes young princes freeing us from corsets with their teeth, or kissing gently in the rain. You know what else isn't always as it seems on screen? Relationships.

Enter award-winning playwright Nick Payne and his brutal depiction of middle-age frustration in the new BBC One drama Wanderlust (which tellingly means travel-hungry).

Pulling out the same themes that made up his 2010 Royal Court debut play – also called Wanderlust – the Tuesday night drama follows a frustrated married couple who, although they love one another still, are in a major rut.

With sarcastic humour and a knowing, dead-eyed look that is carried from her therapist hut in the garden to the sexy-man show in her hydrotherapy class, Toni Collette plays Joy.

She’s married to Alan (Luther’s Steven Mackintosh) who opens the drama trying, unsuccessfully, to get his wife in the mood despite her complaints about his… erm… technique.

She blames her recent bike accident. He blames her attitude. Everything comes to an end with a miserable, anticlimactic dismount and the settling in of a sour mood that can’t even be lifted by a trip to Ann Summers and some netted lingerie. Disappointment, rejection, disappointment.

Oh yes. We all know how sex and relationships are meant to look in films. With a happily ever after and hands gripping the sheets with pleasure. Monogamous bliss. But what if it you just stop wanting to have sex with the person you’re married to?

Wanderlust offers a searing insight into a slowly unraveling sexual union, and a couple brave enough to own up to their feelings and ask for more. It’s funny, honest, clever and filled with unexpected conversations about desire – and so much masturbation you do wonder how Joy, her husband and their children have time for anything else.

Prepare to watch through the gaps in your fingers, rush off to have a series of conversations questioning the necessity of monogamy with all your friends, and then aggressively bin all your sexy underwear.

Wanderlust air date: 4 September 9pm