My husband and I have been watching Manifest, to distract ourselves from the horrors of the world. If you haven’t come across this show yet, do join us, because it’s top-notch bingeable balls. The premise is that a plane lands after a touch of turbulence, and everyone on board is perturbed to learn that they have in fact been missing for five years, presumed dead. Where did they go? No one knows. Next, they start to have psychic visions and hear voices, or ‘callings’, which are extremely vague missions that always turn out to have some higher purpose. With a big government/alien conspiracy and about a billion twists, it doesn’t so much jump the shark as use a shiver of them for a slalom event. Think X Files, Flash Forward, Lost, in a smouldering pile-up of high-concept sci-fi. It’s utter tosh, of course, but it’s really keeping me going. This sort of nonsense is exactly what I need right now, when our own government is conspiring against us, we’re in a weird lockdown time loop, and Boris is the biggest shark jumper of them all.

But the other day my husband went off to do something – I can’t remember what; golf or podcasts or golfing podcasts. Anyway, I was on my own for the evening, and once I’d got the kids to bed with my MO of threats, pleas and screaming, I settled down to square my eyes. Obviously continuing with Manifest alone would be akin to embarking on an affair, so I looked for extracurricular entertainment, preferably a show that wouldn’t interest my other half. Previous solo pursuits have included Anne with an E, Sabrina and Bridgerton - the kind of stuff that makes my husband retch into his hand. So, something wholesome, or supernatural, or sexy, and after trawling Netflix, I fixed on the latter, choosing Sex/Life because I vaguely remembered someone on Twitter saying it was really bad but they tore through it anyway. A really bad show about sex, that you gorb like a dirty burger and feel filthy afterwards? That’ll do for this, my 69th blog.

Sex/Life is about a housewife called Billie who has the dream set-up - gorgeous home, husband, children etc, but she just can’t stop feeling horny about previous sexual encounters back when she was a flighty young thing who used to bang boys in nightclubs. And it’s really killing her buzz, remembering all that hot stuff she used to get up to. Maybe she should get up to it again, despite the fact that she’s currently breastfeeding? Initially, I thought it might be a kind of edgier, updated Sex and the City but it’s not. It’s really really bad, but not in a bingeable way. More like a dodgy canapé that you picked up at a party and are nibbling slightly distastefully, too polite to put down. It’s definitely fishy, and should go in the trash. After I’d watched the first episode, I kept thinking about it, and it made me angrier and angrier the more I mulled. I’m now livid; the self-righteous, spitting ire of a perimenopausal mum whose kid’s school bubble just popped. I need to offload, so if you wouldn’t mind bearing with, pour yourself a Negroni and buckle up for a rant.

Billie is an entirely ludicrous figure. Firstly, there’s no attempt to differentiate between her previous sexual free spirit and her new role as an encumbered mum. She’s still stick-thin and flat-stomached, with absurdly pert breasts – if she’s pushed out two kids in the last three years then I’m Cara Delevingne. When her husband gets back from work, Billie apologises for not having got dressed – I did a double take, as I thought she was wearing some sort of glam, pure-white boho sundress – the sort of thing the Duchess of Cambridge would wear on the steps of the Lindo Wing. But that was apparently her crappy old nightie.

If you’re going to show a real new mother, show her with engorged leaking breasts, a stubborn roll of fat around her midriff, eyes piggy from lack of sleep and constant weeping. Show her with hair falling out in clumps, flatulent from a barely-healed perineal tear, foggy with chronic fatigue. Show her going to the toilet with a chubby hand clutching her swollen ankle: ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy…’ Show her in a stained, holey old t-shirt that rucks up to reveal varicose veins. Show her wincing in agony as she breastfeeds, forgetting to brush her teeth, eating six-for-a-pound doughnuts and prolonging a conversation with the postman because she’s desperate for adult human interaction. But desperate for sex? Once you’ve shown that real mother, ask her if she gives a shit about what she once did in a nightclub. If she can be bothered, she’ll tell you she’s forgotten his name, but she’s desperate for a trip to the pharmacy to get some painkillers and a bit of peace. And then she’d like a lie down, please. Please.

Billie’s carnal musings made me think she might have some sort of undiagnosed puerperal fever. After a night-time feed, she pours herself a gin and has a prolonged lounge on the porch to think about some hot ex-sex. What a fucking waste of time – go to bed, woman! Get some shut-eye, for Chrissake. One of the other intensely annoying things is that all this rumpy-pumpy she’s remembering is supposed to be so raunchy and daring, but it’s actually pretty vanilla and mostly boils down to cunnilingus in clubs. I mean, if you’re going to reflect really hardcore, innovative intercourse, then properly go for it – show her meeting someone in a library and hammering away in the speculative fiction section. Or maybe she could have bumped uglies with a tree surgeon who liked a bit of arboreal action, swinging from branches etc. Penthouse rooftop pool sex with a rich record label owner is just so… unimaginative.

Obviously, frustrated now-Billie keeps a diary recording her longings. This is excruciatingly badly-written, and when her husband inevitably reads it, I assumed his look of horror was a reaction to her abysmal prose. But, learning that she has a fantasy about cunnilingus-club-man, he does exactly what she wants, which is to pound her hard on their kitchen peninsula. Earlier on, he fulfilled my fantasy, which was to insist on mowing the lawn. As they humped away, my (piggy) eyes were on stalks. Where were the kids?! Why weren’t they wandering round asking for a snack and doing those all-the-way-up-the-back explosive poos?

Sex/Life reflects neither of those things; just a silly, pedestrian portrayal of a vacuous, spoilt madam. It’s impossible to feel any sympathy for this self-indulgent cow, who should bloody well go and get a job, or volunteer at a food bank rather than hyperventilating in her skinny jeans. In the current climate, it’s very hard to root for the Billies of this world, if they exist, rather than the real mothers who are leaking and farting and weeping and not-sleeping and working and holding it all together.

It's true that motherhood brings, along with everything else, a profound and gaping sense of loss. The loss of a certain self; of freedom; the feeling of bridges burnt; that you can never recapture the threads of that carefree, yawning-with-time-and-possibility existence - your new parenting sphere narrowing to a dark tunnel until all that remains is a winking pinprick of your previous life. And along with that brings guilt; that you can’t fully savour and relish this pinched-but-enriched, joyous-but-gruelling evolution. This show reduces that thorny, flailing, complex condition to panky-hankering - yearning for some himbo to tweak your panties with his teeth. Give me a break, FFS.

In general, I’m a fan of unreal things, like Manifest, because they offer an escape. But Sex/Life isn’t escapism, it’s mockery. The Manifest metaphor, that the world has moved on without you, and you have to catch up and find your place - your calling - is relatable despite all the MacGuffin around it. In fact, it’s a pretty apt metaphor for motherhood. Whereas Sex/Life isn’t relatable at all – like all that sex Billie had, it’s empty, meaningless and doesn’t lead to anything useful.

Grow up, Billie. Come back to me when your tits are round your knees and your biggest turn-on is an uninterrupted snooze. Maybe then I’ll care.

• Manifest, 3 series, Now TV
• Sex/Life – 8 episodes, Netflix