How Sue Johanson, Canada's 'grandma with a pottymouth,' became the country's leading sexpert
CBC
What does an old lady like Sue Johanson know about sex toys?
"The answer? Plenty," she tells the audience of Sunday Night Sex Show, a colourful spread of adult products on the desk before her.
The scene will be a familiar one to generations of Canadians who tuned in to hear the renowned sex expert hold forth about the birds, bees and beyond on Sunday nights. But this time, it appears in the new documentary, Sex With Sue, which looks back at the now 92-year-old Toronto-born nurse's career and influence on sex education.
"I was older, I was never seen as a sex kitten, I had the gift of the gab," Johanson explains in Sex With Sue, which premieres Monday on the W Network.
The documentary features interviews with the beloved Canadian personality conducted between 2016 and 2018, as well as a legion of her admirers in media, comedy and the adult entertainment industry.
Since signing off from her TV shows in 2008, Johanson has passed the baton — she's always loved a good phallic object — to a new generation of savvy sex educators, who are using podcasts and TikTok to deliver the goods.
CBC News spoke with the creators of Sex With Sue and a new generation of sex educators walking the path that Johanson blazed for them.
The project began when Johanson's daughter, Jane, decided to capture her mother's memories with a series of home interviews. When she realized that she wanted to professionalize their chats, she hired a director and a documentary crew.
"She was able to just educate in a way that had humour that would be a bit shocking," said the younger Johanson, "so that people would then go, 'Oh, what? Did she just say that word? Did she just do this with her hands? Did she just put that on a dildo with her mouth!?' "
Johanson, a sprightly woman with a head of steely grey curls and glasses perched on her nose, was a curious figure on Canadian TV: a "grandma with a pottymouth," as her daughter describes in an interview with CBC News.
On the live call-in program Sunday Night Sex Show that started as a radio show and transitioned to television, Johanson answered pressing questions from a curious audience, tested sex toys from her "pleasure chest" and spoke frankly about sex with no filter to viewers from across the country.
The show aired for nearly a decade, and an American spinoff, called Talk Sex With Sue Johanson, catapulted her from a quirky Canadian phenomenon to international fame.
She became a frequent guest on late night U.S. talk shows, sharing her "gift of the gab" with the likes of Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and David Letterman.
"I grew up with the Sunday Night Sex Show, and Sue was my only meaningful form of education," Lisa Rideout, the Canadian director of Sex With Sue, told CBC News.
