Paul and Chloe have been together since they were teenagers. Mark and Tanith have trust issues. Alex and Alana like pushing the boundaries in the bedroom. What happened when they signed up for reality TV show Open House: The Great Sex Experiment?
Paul and Chloe Woods have been a couple since the age of 17, when they met at sixth form in Liverpool. Neither has ever had sex with anyone else. Now aged 28 and 27 respectively and married, with what they believe to be an active and healthy sex life, they do, however, have questions. “Am I a good kisser? Am I good in bed? How would I ever know?” Paul asks.
Chloe, meanwhile, has long had the sense that she might be attracted to women too, but has never felt able to act on it. So a few years ago, the couple — who jointly run a café in Wigan — decided to try opening up their marriage, exploring the idea of sex with other people, together and/or with the other’s full knowledge and consent.
“We talked about trying sex clubs and dating apps, but we don’t know how safe it is,” Paul says. “We’re new to it all and we don’t really understand it. Stepping out of our comfort zone is hard, and we didn’t want to take unnecessary risks.”
Mark Thomson, 41, and his fiancée, Tanith Hooren, 31, have been together for three years after meeting in their local pub in Wakefield. But the couple, who now run a landscape gardening company, have had some “trust issues”. Mark admits to having always had “a wandering eye” and struggling with fidelity. When they met, he was married (albeit estranged) and confesses that in the past he “had secret phones — it spiralled out of control”. In their first year together, they both cheated on each other.
“I thought perhaps relationships weren’t for me,” Mark says. “I didn’t want to hurt people, but I kept getting it wrong.”
Tanith, a former dancer, lived in France for a decade where, she says, she became familiar with the open relationships she saw flourishing around her. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, the couple have discussed whether opening up their relationship — having sex with other people consensually — might help them both build trust. “We thought perhaps that sort of relationship — with openness and honesty, talking about everything — could work for us,” Mark says. “And it is just an experiment,” Tanith adds. “It’s real, but it’s also not real. And we thought it would help us grow as a couple.”
Last September, both couples gave it a go, spending 48 hours in a large country house near the coast in rural Somerset. Their housemates for the weekend were 25 “residents” — liberated, open-minded and promiscuous members of the polyamory, non-monogamy and swinging communities — recruited to “facilitate their guests opening up their relationships”, ie to have sex with them.
Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, coming to Channel 4 next week, is “social commentary, or social provocation, with entertainment”, claims its creator, Jes Wilkins.
There are on-screen threesomes, foursomes and fivesomes, endless girl-on-girl action and a cacophonous, near-constant soundtrack of slurping, smacking and screaming. As Paul notes to Chloe as they pack their bags to leave after 48 hours of sex with would-be strangers, “We went from being a virgin couple to you sleeping with four people in one weekend.”
The couples report the experience to be so overwhelming that on arrival they instantly forgot about all the cameras.
And it shows. There’s a barrage of naked breasts, bums and other bits, and (as a viewer) a lot of, “Gosh, are they really showing that on terrestrial TV?”
It’s the third series of the show. The first launched in 2022; The Guardian’s review called it “horribly compelling, cringe and all”, writing of the “sheer, unbearable awkwardness of it all”.
This series, however, is the first in which producers did not struggle to find volunteers. “Hundreds” of couples applied, Wilkins claims, and, “The show has built its own momentum in terms of casting. So the vast majority of the people in this series are people who sat on their sofa with their partners watching the second series and it triggered conversations.”
What has not changed is the cringe factor. “Socials” in the house, designed to oil the wheels of seduction, include an Eighties party and a “sexy barn dance”.
But far from the series being simply an awkward, X-rated version of Love Island, Wilkins — whose previous shows include My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and Mums Make Porn — believes it’s “a riposte to all the bikini-clad reality shows. These are real-life, long-established couples, not couples created by producers just for the show.”
And it is not, he claims, a “classic social experiment in television terms. Our couples are not guinea pigs being experimented upon — they are in control of their own experiment.” Similarly, the “residents have agency”, he says. Recruited from online communities of swingers and polyamorists and including some stars of niche non-monogamous social media channels, “They are facilitators, there to help our couples open up their relationships, but they are there to be seduced and are under no pressure to have sex with anyone.” They are paid “minimal expenses” to take part in the programme, but, “They are not sex workers,” Wilkins says.
They are a progressive, promiscuous bunch though. There’s “Orgy Jen” and her partner, Marc, who have a TikTok account promoting the joys of polyamory. There are Olivia and Gage, who have recently launched their own non-monogamy app, SwingHub. There’s Naomi, a “survival expert”, and Marie, a Parisian lingerie model, both in open marriages. Off camera, the residents also had their own “incredible experience”, Wilkins says. The house’s remoteness was a mercy, Paul says, as the regular residents’ orgies were not subdued affairs.
This potentially explosive experiment is not conducted without adult supervision. On hand to help the couples navigate the messy new world of open relationships is Effy Blue, a relationship coach who specialises in non-monogamy and polyamory. “The chance to try it in a safe environment, with a relationship coach, is like getting two in one,” Paul says. “We get to try stuff out, and then we get to have a debrief about it.”
And Paul needs the debriefs more than anticipated. Having entered the house expecting to be the more confident partner, and his wife, Chloe, to be the more reticent, on their first night she comfortably dives into a threesome with two other women while Paul declines the offer of something similar in a hot tub. But, after a consultation with Effy the next morning, and some reframing and resetting, on their second night the couple go on a date together with one of the residents, Grace, which culminates in a threesome. “I feel reborn,” pronounces a satisfied Paul.
Mark and Tanith, meanwhile, have an even bumpier start to their non-monogamous minibreak. While she mingles politely with residents at a demure cocktail party, Mark plunges into an enthusiastic orgy with four female residents in the “yurt” — a sex wigwam with no soundproofing. Back in their bedroom, a tearful Tanith declares herself “humiliated” but determinedly soldiers on, reminding herself that it is “an experiment” and refusing to be “beaten by it”. The threesome she and Mark go on to enjoy on their second night with Marie, the French lingerie model — who turns up with a gift of a basque and suspenders for Tanith — is loudly declared a resounding success by all involved.
Effy Blue has been part of the open relationship scene in New York for more than 15 years. A former advertising executive, she retrained to become a coach to fill the void she felt existed in terms of advice and support for people testing out less conventional models of relationships.
“There were very few people doing it, and those people felt out on the edge,” Blue says. “They felt very alternative, and that didn’t represent me or my lifestyle. So I retrained to become a resource that was closer to the mainstream.”
Equally mainstream now, Wilkins claims, are the couples taking part in the show. “I first made shows about polyamory 15, 20 years ago and it all felt very alternative. Now, this is not something that is only done by ‘alternative’ people,” he says. “This could be your next-door neighbours. These are normal people with normal jobs and normal families who are challenging and questioning the rules of society.”
According to the latest YouGov data, while numbers of people in the UK reporting to have been in an open relationship are still low, at 4 per cent, 9 per cent of respondents are open to the idea — a figure that rises to 13 per cent among 18 to 24-year-olds. More may be curious; according to Google, “open relationship” was the top trending relationship term in the search engine in 2024, with “poly relationship” taking fifth place.
According to Blue, there are myriad reasons for the mainstreaming of non-monogamy, including dating apps offering “open relationships” as a search term and entire apps, such as Feeld, designed specifically for polyamorists, swingers, fetishists and those who otherwise fancy a relationship less conventional. A greater openness towards sexual orientation and gender identity is also a big factor, she believes.
“More and more people — particularly women — are coming out as bisexual and saying, ‘This is my full sexual expression and I would like it to be satisfied,’ and it makes sense that non-monogamy is potentially an answer for that.”
She also sees a correlation between non-monogamy and women’s rights. “The more opportunities for women and stability for women, the more you see non-monogamy rates rise.”
Alana Edmond, 29, and Alex Hitchens, 38, enjoy “pushing boundaries in the bedroom”. They’ve been together for three years and can see themselves living “the lifestyle”, as it is known among swingers.
Alana, a nail technician, has had relationships with women in the past but struggles with the idea of Alex, who runs a recruitment company, being attracted to other women. “The stakes are quite high for me,” she says.
Their goal on entering the house is to have a couple swap. When Effy advises them instead to try a threesome with another woman, Alana admits that she “feels sick” at the prospect.
Nonetheless, after time spent in the hot tub with Georgie, a self-described “unicorn” (dating slang for a woman who has sex with couples), they invite her back to their room, where Alana enters into the experience entirely while Alex, feeling “overwhelmed” in the event, finds himself unable to engage.
“The show really highlights your vulnerabilities and you find out a lot about yourself,” he says. “I discovered that I needed more connection.”
In a debrief the next day with Blue, Alex says something was missing, that he’s never been a one-night stand person and needs a deeper connection before having sex. The couple leave the house having not achieved their aim for the experiment.
Seven months on, however, they’ve achieved plenty. They’ve been to a sex party (“Which was incredible,” Alana says), been on several dates with a woman together and spent a recent weekend at a spa with her. “We now also have a couple that we are good friends with and have done a full couple swap,” Alana says.
“It’s ridiculous to think that people are not going to find other people attractive. It’s just not socially acceptable to say it,” she says. “But now we can sit in a coffee shop together and say, ‘Ooh, she’s pretty.’ ”
Chloe and Paul haven’t had sex with anyone else since leaving the house. But, “I feel like a new person,” says Chloe, who now identifies as bisexual. “I unlocked another part of myself and I just feel complete.” Paul, meanwhile, is thrilled to see his wife “glowing all the time” and says that opening up their relationship has brought them closer. “It’s hot to do that together, for that to be a part of the relationship now. I’d say that sex is probably even better with three people than it is with two.”
Mark and Tanith have also been to several sex parties and found “a community of like-minded people — couples and single people”, Mark says.
“We know what our vibe is now: we like girls,” Tanith says. Couples are trickier, they find. “It’s difficult with more people. The more people, the more feelings to consider.”
Their active polyamory has been postponed for now as Tanith is pregnant, with their baby due in August.
Mark, meanwhile, feels little of his old compulsion to stray. “Now I can be open and honest about myself and that’s changed me,” he says. “Now I feel like I can do it, it’s not a big deal.”
Open House: The Great Sex Experiment starts on May 9 on Channel 4 at 10pm