Love & Passion Quote by Victoria Wood

Victoria Wood lands the joke by pretending to be nostalgic for a more innocent past, then puncturing that innocence with the grubby reality: ignorance doesn’t prevent sexual knowledge, it just reroutes it through whatever’s lying around. “In my day” is the classic throat-clearing of generational superiority, a setup that primes you for a sermon about manners and morals. The punchline swerves into confession. Sex education didn’t vanish; it was outsourced to television, that always-on, half-accidental tutor.

The phrase “picked up what we could” does a lot of work. It evokes scavenging, not learning: fragments of innuendo, plotlines, late-night adverts, and the soft-focus codes of mainstream entertainment. Wood is skewering a culture that preferred euphemism to clarity, leaving kids to reverse-engineer adulthood from sitcom cues and suggestive camera pans. It’s funny because it’s plausible and a little shameful; the audience recognizes their own patchwork education in it.

Context matters: Wood’s Britain grew up under a polite, buttoned-up public culture where sex was everywhere and nowhere at once. TV, regulated and domesticated, still smuggled in desire through what couldn’t be said aloud at home or school. The subtext is not just “we were clueless,” but “our institutions chose cluelessness.” Wood’s genius is making that indictment feel like a throwaway line, delivered with the brisk understatement of someone who knows exactly how society keeps its secrets: not by silence, but by letting the screen do the talking.