Ken Tynan was a stylish troublemaker. This drama about him focuses on a period in his life when his troublemaking got out of hand, endangering his career and even his marriage. In the early sixties, as an important figure in Britain’s newly-formed National Theatre, Tynan was a member of the establishment. It was the sort of job that usually leads to honours and titles. But Tynan used his position within the establishment to challenge it. He went, as he usually did, too far. In this clip from the drama, in which all the dialogue is taken from Tynan’s actual journalism, he appears on television and challenges the National Theatre to stage a sex show. To support his point that we should all be open about our sexuality, he describes in shocking detail his particular sexual tastes.

75 minutes, a BBC Fiction Lab production broadcast on BBC4 in 2005