It’s hard to know whether or not one should recommend an episode of a TV programme that features an unexpurgated screening of Martin Creed’s Sick Film – a film of people being sick. 

For what it’s worth I gagged and looked away. Personally, I’d prefer to watch Question Time 2015-2021, the Peter Jackson cut, than see that again.

That said, however, Sick Film and its self-explanatory companion piece S–t Film did perfectly illustrate the point presenter Mary Beard was trying to make in this first episode of her otherwise excellent new series, Mary Beard’s Forbidden Art (BBC Two). The point was that some art has always been off limits to someone somewhere; one person’s beyond the pale is another’s Sunflowers. 

The Romans, Beard’s specialist subject, had no problem with statues of the god Pan having explicit sex with a she-goat (which, as Pan is half-goat himself, takes some unpicking). So maybe it’s just we 21st-century prudes who can’t deal with watching someone depositing a turd and walking off.

There have been several series these last few months about supposed taboos, such as breastfeeding your boyfriend or having sex with a flatbed scanner (I made that last one up but it’s bound to be a thing somewhere). Mainly they’ve been to do with how one person’s obscenity is another’s normality, and how they’re all thriving in the cultural petri dish that is the Internet.