It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews for BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that ‘We are no longer shocked that people have sex.’ Either way, the tabloids soon proved him wrong. Days before the programme went out, the Sun had duly worked itself up into a state of delighted outrage about a TV drama that was apparently ‘so steamy it borders on porn’.
In the event, this proved an exaggeration wild enough to suggest that none of the journalists involved had seen the programme —or, less likely, any porn. Sunday’s adaptation, written and directed by Jed Mercurio, was entirely free of both nudity and any of the rude words famously debated at the 1960 Chatterley trial. (For the record, it did have one ‘cock’.) Even the sex relied regularly on the use of trusty visual imagery, with Mellors shooting guns, wielding large tools and proffering toffee apples for her ladyship to nibble on — when, that is, she wasn’t getting wet in the rain.
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