Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn proud of show's impact

Since 2019, Laurie Nunn has been crafting award-winning storylines, taboo-busting scenes and an endless amount of sex gags.

But that's all come to an end now the fourth and final series of her creation Sex Education is out.

"I'm going to take a moment to remember what my brain feels like without writing so many penis jokes," she says.

The Netflix teen sex comedy has boldly tackled topics including slut-shaming, abortion, virginity and masturbation - and that was just the first series.

It's also highlighted everything from sexual assault and STDs to disability and trans identities since it was first streamed.

So as the final series is released, writer Laurie reflects on the impact it's had.

"It's been really wonderful to see how people have connected with the characters and also the subject matter," she tells BBC Newsbeat.

"I hope that people enjoy the final outing."

Laurie says the show started out as "this quite basic idea of what would happen if we put a teenage sex therapist on to a school campus".

That teenage sex therapist turned into the inexperienced Otis (Asa Butterfield) who, encouraged by the entrepreneurial Maeve (Emma Mackey), ends up running a self-styled clinic at their school Moordale.

"It was a real opportunity to make a TV show that is really funny and entertaining and quite crude, and sometimes really outrageous," Laurie says.

"But it's also able to touch on topics that young people feel are important when it comes to talking about their sexuality and identity."

Viewers have grown attached to characters as they discover their sexualities and gender identities, while the show's also raised awareness of little-known conditions.

And that's a particular point of pride for Laurie, who highlights Lily's (Tanya Reynolds) storyline from the first series where she learns she has vaginismus.

The NHS describes the condition as when the vagina suddenly tightens up just as you try to insert something into it.

"I probably got more messages about that than anything else that we've ever touched on in the show," Laurie says.

She says young women got in touch to say it had helped them realise they may have the condition and that they'd been to see a doctor as a result.

"It actually felt like there was something that was educational in the show that went out and actually did have an affect on people's lives."

The show's been widely praised for its honesty, diversity and representation of difficult subjects.

Aimee Lou Wood, who plays her namesake Aimee, won a Bafta in 2021 for her portrayal of being sexually assaulted on a bus in series two.

And writer Laurie tells Newsbeat that storyline was "particularly personal to me".

"I had a very cathartic experience writing that," she says.

"And I've had a lot of lovely messages from people who felt they were affected by that."

The success of Sex Education has also catapulted its cast into household names and international fame.

Emma Mackey, Connor Swindells and Ncuti Gatwa all appeared in 2023's biggest box office hit Barbie, and Gatwa will be the 15th incarnation of Doctor Who.

Laurie says she hadn't planned for the fourth series to be the last time we saw the characters these actors brought to life, but she felt their stories had reached a natural end.

"The further I got into the scripting, the more I realised these storylines were just very organically coming to an end," she says.

"All of the characters were left in a place that I felt really good about and I felt really happy and hopeful for their future."

So who's the character Laurie will miss the most?

It's a hard question for her to answer but she plumps for Otis' mum Jean, played by Gillian Anderson.

"I really love playing with the kind of contradictions in her character," Laurie says.

"On one hand she's this very together, uptight, wise, knowledgeable character but then she sometimes does things that are just so out of control and messy."

Perhaps unusually for a TV writer, Laurie wasn't much of a fan of series and box sets until her 20s.

But after four years and 32 episodes of Sex Education, it's not a format she's looking to move away from any time soon.

"I love writing TV," she says. "So hopefully I'll get to do it again in the future."

Listen to BBC Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.