‘Wank Week’: the wildest Channel 4 series that never was

Posted On July 26, 2024July 26, 2024

Back in the heyday of Channel 4, the free-to-air public broadcast TV channel was the undisputed champion of cutting edge, daring television. Long before it was reduced to reruns of reality shows and second-rate comedy series, the heads of C4 doused the channel with programmes in line with a controversial yet exciting public service remit.

While many Channel 4 programmes saw some of the most innovative moments of the early 21st-century television programme, there had equally been times when the editors and programmers of the channel had to pull the plug. Complaints were always coming into the C4 office throughout the 2000s, but when public scrutiny surrounding 2007’s ‘Wank Week’, the powers that be shut the documentary season down.

Set to be broadcast in 2007, ‘Wank Week’ was set to be comprised of three documentary programmes about, you guessed it, masturbation. Wanking has always been a deep interest of the British public, and Channel 4 was, of course, the best channel to look at the beloved pastime, although by the time all was said and done, not a glimpse of masturbation ended up being shown.

The season had been commissioned by Channel 4’s factual entertainment commissioning editor, James Hindle, who felt it was “exactly the type of provocative and mischievous programming” that the channel should have been airing. Naturally, given the topic of the programmes, they were set to run post-watershed at 11pm, with a grand finale of a documentary about mass public masturbation.

A working title for the first-announced show was Wank-a-thon, which focused on a huge “Masturbate-a-thon” held in Clerkenwell in London in August 2006. Up next was to be I Can’t Stop Wanking, a documentary about compulsive male masturbators running for an hour in length and focusing on those who were trying to cut down from wanking around 20 times a day to something more in line with a “normal” sense of self-pleasure.

Finally, ‘Wank Week’ should have been brought to a rousing climax with Masturbation For Girls, hosted by the sex educationalist Betty Dodson, with a natural focus on female masturbation. However, just a month after being announced, ‘Wank Week’ was widely criticised, with claims of a lowering standard of broadcast output being levied at Channel 4.

Channel 4’s public service remit stated that there had to be a certain amount of “educational” programming, but when ‘Wank Week’ was announced, the criticism joked that even C4 would find justifying the three consisting programmes as educational “a hard one to pull off”, a pun that spread throughout the media in the coming weeks.

This criticism was all taking place in the summer of 2006, but ‘Wank Week’ wasn’t meant to come on screen until March the next year, so C4 still believed they might have been able to dodge the backlash. However, in February 2007, just a week before the prospective airing, and following a huge criticism of Channel 4 and a major Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal, ‘Wank Week’ was postponed in order to avoid further embarrassment.

Reportedly, a number of C4 senior figures were not happy with ‘Wank Week’, and with Ofcom reviewing the channel’s finances ahead of the digital switchover, the decision was finally made to cancel the masturbatory celebration. The three films were made available for broadcast individually but certainly not together under the now-flaccid ‘Wank Week’ banner.

Channel 4 had once been a daring public broadcast service in the United Kingdom, and its cancelled ‘Wank Week’ series was set to be one of their most controversial entries. Long gone are the times of C4’s heyday, and the three ‘Wank Week’ movies are those that never quite made it to the finish line.

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