General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Tofu (2015 TV series)

Tofu is a British factual web series from 2015 in which real people and the casts of the dramas Cucumber and Banana talk openly about modern sex, presented by the YouTuber Benjamin Cook and released on Channel 4's on-demand platform 4oD.¹ It ran for eight episodes of roughly 10 to 11 minutes each as the documentary strand of a three-part project conceived by writer Russell T Davies, alongside the Channel 4 drama Cucumber and the E4 anthology Banana.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Format	Eight-part factual documentary series with sketch comedy and fantasy elements, about 10–11 minutes per episode, on 4oD¹^•³
First availability	Episode 1 went up on demand at 10:30pm on 22 January 2015, following that evening's Cucumber and Banana premieres⁴
Key people	Written by Russell T Davies; made by Benjamin Cook, who also presents; executive producers Nicola Shindler and Davies for RED Production Company⁵^•²
Title origin	Named for the softest of four erection-hardness categories in a Swiss study: tofu, peeled banana, banana, cucumber⁶
Participants	More than 40 interviewees of varied ages, genders and orientations, plus the casts of Cucumber and Banana¹
Ratings	Audience score of 6.5 out of 10 on Plex; 5.8 on the OTTASIA listing³^•⁵
Status	One season only; not currently available on the streaming services tracked by several guides³^•⁵

Spoilers

Content and participants

Each episode turned a cast of over 40 interviewees loose on the week's subject, which covered matters ranging from great sex and terrible sex to abstinence, adolescent desire, televised sex, dating apps, revealing one's sexuality, and beyond.¹ Cook described the series as combining the raunchy with tales of "great beauty, sensitivity and bravery", covering first sex, virginity, pressure, sexlessness, tragedy, and triumph.¹ The interviewees ranged widely in age and identity; Cook's introduction names, among others, a 54-year-old woman who had made sex irrelevant to her life, a professional dominatrix who transitioned at 43, an 18-year-old preparing to come out in a YouTube video to more than 40,000 people, and a 60-year-old grandmother who dated men in their twenties.¹

The actors of the companion dramas appeared as themselves: Bethany Black (Helen in Cucumber), Fisayo Akinade (Dean), Julie Hesmondhalgh (Cleo), Ceallach Spellman (Adam), Vincent Franklin (Henry), Rufus Hound (Rupert), and Cyril Nri (Lance).⁵ In the first episode Bethany Black said that "especially in this country, I think we have a fucked up idea about sex", a line Cook cited as the problem the series set out to address.¹ The final episode had the public and the two casts reveal their fantasies and most outrageous sex stories.⁹

Place in the Cucumber, Banana, Tofu trilogy

Channel 4 commissioned the three strands together in November 2013 from Davies, the creator of Queer as Folk and showrunner of Doctor Who from 2005 to 2010, with Piers Wenger, then Channel 4's head of drama, as commissioner and RED Production Company making the shows under executive producers Nicola Shindler and Davies.²^•⁷ Cucumber, an 8 × 60-minute serial for Channel 4, follows Henry (Vincent Franklin) and his boyfriend Lance (Cyril Nri) through a disastrous date night; Banana, 8 × 30 minutes on E4, tells one-off stories about younger characters orbiting Henry.² Tofu extends that world online: each week it takes up real issues raised in the dramas, with members of the public and the dramas' actors testifying about love, sex and intimacy.²^•⁷

The Canada Media Fund described the arrangement as a transmedia story, with three series on three channels telling one connected story; Davies himself compared Cucumber to a novel and Banana to a set of short stories about its peripheral characters.⁷^•⁸ Filming began in spring 2014 in Manchester.²

The title

All three titles come from a classification Davies read about in which a Swiss scientific institute divided erection hardness into four categories, from softest to firmest: tofu, peeled banana, banana, and cucumber.⁶ Davies said that on reading this he "knew I had my drama".² In his introduction to the show, Cook joked about the name's effect on people who assumed the series was named after the blandest of foods, answering that "unlike tofu the food, Tofu the show is vibrant and gorgeous, and crammed full of smut".¹

Production credits and availability

Credits vary slightly between databases. OTTASIA lists the series as created by Nicola Shindler and Russell T Davies, written by Davies and produced by Julie Gardner, with Benjamin Cook as presenter.⁵ Plex credits Cook as director and Michaela Fereday as producer, with Shindler, Davies and Julie Gardner as executive producers.³ Channel 4's own press release states that Tofu "will be made by Benjamin Cook" within the RED Production Company production.²

Unlike Cucumber and Banana, which reached US audiences on Logo TV from April 2015, Tofu was not slated to come to the United States; Davies described it there as 10-minute documentaries covering categories the dramas did not.¹⁰ The series ran for one season and was not renewed.³ Streaming guides in the Philippines and elsewhere currently list it as unavailable on tracked services.⁵^•⁹

Channel 4's 2015 annual report grouped the trilogy together as a commissioning experiment, saying that Banana, Cucumber and Tofu "bravely flagged up the issues of gender identity" that soon became prominent in the national conversation and that transmitting across Channel 4, E4 and online tested a new way to commission programs across platforms.¹¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026