What, no nudity? BBC covers up Lady Chatterley
ARTS CORRESPONDENT IT IS D.H. Lawrence’s most notorious novel, banned for decades due to its sexually explicit language until a landmark obscenity trial.
But a new BBC adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is set to shock viewers for another, entirely contradictory reason – it is remarkably chaste.
Featuring Borgias star Holliday Grainger in the title role and Game Of Thrones actor Richard Madden as her gamekeeper lover, it contains no explicit nude scenes.
Yet the novel, which was written in 1928, had so many F-words and explicit sex scenes that the unexpurgated version was banned in the UK until 1960. Even then, publishers Penguin was prosecuted for obscenity, with the ‘not guilty’ verdict making legal history.
The latest adaptation will be much tamer than the BBC’s 1993 version, starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean. The nude scenes in that version were so explicit that they sparked complaints from viewers. Defending his new restrained adaptation, writer Jed Mercurio said: ‘D.H. Lawrence used a certain type of language in the book because it was ground-breaking. He was making a point about artistic expression.
‘That battle has been won. The idea was to tell this as a love story, a love triangle. Swearing or sex scenes don’t excite me because they don’t have emotional content.’
Lawrence’s novel about love across the social divide tells the story of Constance Chatterley, a married woman who seeks sexual satisfaction elsewhere after her husband is wounded during the First World War and left paralysed from the waist down.
The arrogant and ruthless Sir Clifford Chatterley, played by Happy Valley’s James Norton, is desperate for an heir to inherit his mining fortune so is not averse to the idea of Constance sleeping with other men – as long as they are from the right social class.
He is mortified when he discovers that his wife has fallen in love with gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and is carrying his child.
But despite the lack of overt nudity, BBC bosses hope their new version, which features three sexual encounters between Constance and Mellors, will deliver its own erotic charge. And while naked flesh may not be in abundance, there is some X-rated language.
In one scene, Mellors strokes his lover’s thigh and tells her: ‘You’ve got a real soft sloping bottom...
‘It’s a bottom that could hold the world up.’