Virgin Island review: Channel 4's new reality show is a serious look at sex and intimacy with an added ick factor

Once again, we have people sent to a “paradise island”, where they are to take part in a “unique experiment”.

Only this time, for us repressed Britons as least, it has the added ick factor of being about sex and requiring the airing of feelings and emotions.

In this instance, 12 young people in their 20s and early 30s are marooned on an island in the Med with “ground-breaking sex therapists” Celeste and Danielle and their plucky band of “international sex coaches”.

They're there to help our flirty dozen – all virgins who are becoming increasingly concerned they will never find anyone willing to get intimate with them – move past their fears, neuroses and hang-ups and find sexual fulfilment.

If this sounds like the worst, most excruciating, television ever, then one one hand, you'd be right.

Firstly, having a team of “international sex coaches” makes it sound as if they'll be standing on the sidelines, shouting encouragement, or illustrating positions with a magnetic whiteboard and a magic marker.

Meanwhile, Celeste and Danielle steam right into things, getting our 12 virgins to breathe loudly, try touching – when many of them are reluctant to share a hug – and demonstrate desire by being pushed up against a convenient tent-pole. Not a euphemism, fortunately.

The participants are not impressed - “it's like watching a sex scene with your parents times a hundred” - and worry about the semi-religious overtones.

“It seems cultish,” says one, “they have this island where they live in a completely different world.”

On the other hand, the more you watch, the more it seems to make sense.

One thing the participants all have in common is a lack of self-confidence and sense of shame that they still have their virginity. All Celeste and Danielle are doing is trying to break that down and rebuild their sense of self-esteem, and the notion that people will find them attractive.

As drama graduate Devah says: “I describe myself as a nerd... so maybe if I can lose my virginity that's one less thing people can ridicule me over.”

One of our 12, Zac, is noticeably keener to get involved than the others, and moves things along at a much faster rate.

He has valid reasons: “All of the shame and the self-criticism that come with being a virgin, my hope will be that afterwards that will be gone, because you're not any more... you don't have to put that label on you any more.”

However, when he meets a surrogate partner, apparently a “highly-trained therapist who can have sex with a partner”, it's enough to make you feel rather uneasy about the ethics of the whole thing.

But the saving grace of Virgin Island is also, perhaps, it's biggest failing.

It would be easy for the show to snigger at the participants – and even easier to laugh at the airy-fairy spirituality of the therapists - but it never does.

It takes them and their problems entirely seriously, never forgetting that they are missing out on something which most of us take for granted.

It also observes that there is a distinction between sex and intimacy, that one is purely physical and the other requires an emotional and intellectual connection which makes it more satisfying.

But that seriousness means that, at times, it is very po-faced and you just wish that, like the participants, it would just loosen up a bit.