The worst thing about TV sex scenes? The ridiculous sound effects

Television is full of strange tropes and signifiers that bear little resemblance to the real world, but few are both so odd and so unremarked-on as the way sex is depicted on screen.

From the standards around which bits we get to see (boobs and bottoms, yes; penises, no) to the fact that a remarkable number of couples re-don their underwear immediately after their passionate interlude, things happen with telly sex that do not happen in real life.

But is any TV convention more peculiar – and more counterproductive – than the sound effects we're obliged to endure when a couple kiss?

Two shows generating a bit of water-cooler buzz at the moment centrally feature sex. One is Normal People (Stan), in which two photogenic teens divide their time between having a lot of enthusiastic sex in private, and ignoring each other in public. The other is Unorthodox (Netflix), in which our heroine Esty is initially obliged to endure the attentions of her inexpert husband and then finally gets to enjoy her first experience of real intimacy when she escapes the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community into which she was born.

Much has been made of the good taste and verisimilitude with which the Normal People sex scenes are conducted. And I've certainly seen worse. But despite the series making a number of interesting choices in other areas, when Marianne and Connell kiss – and they kiss a lot – we get the same hideous sucking, slurping sounds that have become a lazy, unthinking reflex for makers of television everywhere.

When people kiss on screen we're subjected to sound effects that may as well have been harvested by recording people eating mac 'n' cheese with their mouths open or sucking snot back into their nasal passages. When Connell and Marianne kiss, it sounds less like a passionate crescendo and more like they're inelegantly sharing a bowl of ramen. It's not sexy. It's kind of revolting.

Unorthodox, on the other hand, is remarkable for the way it eschews convention. The only nudity we see is when a man, tormented by his past and present deeds, strips off and plunges into the River Havel in an attempt to wash away his sins. Not sexy. Not supposed to be. Meanwhile Esty and her husband remain almost fully clothed during their wince-making sexual encounters. When, later, she does get close to a man – physically and emotionally – no one gets naked, and no one sucks face. Instead the exchange is delicate, wordless and almost soundless – and as a consequence is one of the most erotically charged scenes in recent TV history.

Sure, in real life we all – from time to time – make weird bodily noises when we're getting intimate. But – maybe it's just me? – far from driving me to greater heights of passion, mostly they make me want to giggle. And those sucking, slurping sounds in any other context only get me hot under the collar insofar as they make me want to upbraid someone on their lack of manners, or simply get as far away as possible from that hideous noise.

Makers of television have worked hard in recent years to be more imaginative and adventurous, to not just dish up the same-ol', same-ol'. Perhaps next time someone decides a sex scene is absolutely necessary (and whether explicit sex scenes are ever necessary is a whole other can of worms), they could make it without inferring that both parties are trying to remove each other's tongues through suction. There's nothing sexy about that.

Melinda Houston is a television critic.