Couples in separate beds on TV

Okay so everybody knows back in the 40s and 50s in TV and movies, they always showed married couples as sleeping in separate twin beds...because apparently the thought of two married people in a double bed were so scandalous, and if Hitchcock's movie The Trouble with Harry is any indicator, it didn't start becoming an appropriate thing to even talk about in passing until the mid 50s. So because of this, everybody loves to talk about how uptight and prudish and puritan American/western society is and especially was back then.

Okay, so here's what I want to know, WHY is it in the 1970s British series Thriller, they portray husbands and wives as sleeping in separate twin beds as well? It's 20-30 years later, it's over on the other side of the world where they are not so 'prudish' as us, so what was the reason for that? Does anybody know?

No idea why it took them so long to get with the program over there, but couples were still sleeping in seperate beds all the way up until the mid 1960s. Herman and Lily Monster were the first to NOT have a double bed.

That is rather Odd since England is far ahead of America as far as being puritanical.

Or at least they claim to be. Also, here's one to try and figure out...when the TV series Highlander is shown in Europe, the censors feel a need to change the framing size so you can NOT see a character who has a knife sticking out of his chest because it is judged to be TOO violent for THEIR culture, but it's just fine here in America. ALSO, you have the movie The Last House on the Left from 1972, a movie that is almost 40 years old, and STILL, the British censors REFUSE to show the whole movie in its entirety because it's still considered too violent, too graphic, too everything.

Go figure, they will show nudity on TV but yet they won't show something they consider too violent. I guess if they can't show Last House on the Left then Friday the 13th would be cut down to 15 minutes!!

Tony Marino wrote:Go figure, they will show nudity on TV but yet they won't show something they consider too violent. ...

Hmm, just the opposite of US.

At least they showed beds. This was at least an acknowledgment of the bodily function of sleep. Ever remember seeing a toilet?

Not until Psycho, but let's be honest, nobody WANTS to see those anyway.

Such an embarrassing touch point of societal mentality back then that they actually had husbands and wives sleep in separate beds in fiction. Instead of making them seem more wholesome and purified, all it did was draw attention to the question of HOW they were having sex in their bedroom.

You don't need a bed to have sex, everybody knows that. The 'Hook' urban legend that everybody's so familiar with, trace its origins back to the 1940s when teenagers first really started having cars of their own due in part because many people have their first sexual encounters in cars, as opposed to other places, and if a teenager can figure that out, so can an adult. Or like Ray Bradbury and his wife, before they were married back in the 40's, her father walked in on them because they were on the living room floor.

Marc™ wrote:Such an embarrassing touch point of societal mentality back then that they actually had husbands and wives sleep in separate beds in fiction. Instead of making them seem more wholesome and purified, all it did was draw attention to the question of HOW they were having sex in their bedroom.

That's puritanicals for you. Doesn't dawn on them that masking or ignoring situations they deem immoral has a greater chance of highlighting it more. 1950s and early-mid 1960s society tried its best to use TV and film to manipulate a laughably neutered image of the way they thought society should be and all that wound up happening instead was the sexual revolution.

And look what happens. The Addams Family, which oddly enough despite their morbid and macabre ways of life, were declared by psychologists to be the most NORMAL family on TV and they were also the first TV couple to have any indication of a sex life, that they were passionate and intimate, Gomez especially whenever Morticia said anything French.