Two sex scenes in the first saga that the BBC hopes

ON THE night before her wedding, in a sumptuous Parisian hotel suite, a beautiful brideto-be with tumbling red hair opens the door to her lover. Although he is not the man she is to marry in the morning, they kiss passionately, before he rips off her clothes and ravishes her on the carpet.

This is the arresting opening to

by the BBC’s latest period drama, Parade’s End.

It boasts two sex scenes in the first six minutes. The second features the show’s stars, Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall, breathlessly panting and grappling at one another through illicit sexual congress in a railway carriage. A scene in a later episode shows a naked Hall smoking in the bath.

Downton Abbey’s Lord and Lady Grantham would be appalled – never dreaming of such lewdness. But the BBC hopes that Parade’s End will soon be beating Downton in the battle for ratings and criti- cal plaudits. Cumberbatch has already launched an attack on ITV’s hit costume drama, denouncing it as ‘sentimental’, ‘cliched’ and ‘atrocious’.

Outraged Downton devotees are now labelling the actor ‘Cumberbitch’ but its creator, Julian Fellowes, appears to be talking down the furore, claiming: ‘I am quite sure what Ben said has been taken out of context.’

Like Downton, Parade’s End opens in 1912 and unravels the tangled love lives of the English upper-classes in the run-up to the First World War. It soon makes Fellowes’s version of Edwardian life – in which a Turkish gentleman has died in Lady Mary’s bed after making love with her and Lady Sybil has run off with a chauffeur – look positively prim and proper. TV insiders have already dubbed the BBC production ‘Downton for grown-ups’.

‘I like the idea of it being called an adult drama,’ says Susanna White, director of the new five-part series. ‘The two shows are very different animals and although they may appear to have the same spots, they don’t.

‘The only similarity is the period in which they are set and the fact that they are both about a load of toffs.

‘Downton is just a lovely thing to curl up in front of with a glass of wine but ours is the opposite. I like to think of Parade’s End as Downton Abbey meets The Wire,’ she adds, referring to the gritty American crime series.

The £12million production – one of the most expensive dramas ever commissioned by the BBC – was adapted from acclaimed modernist writer Ford Madox Ford’s series of four novels also called Parade’s End.

In contrast to Downton Abbey, which many viewers feel at times descends into soap opera, the BBC drama could not be more highbrow. ‘Ford Madox Ford tracks the shifting moods of the nation, from chauvinistic pre-war Edwardian complacency to post-war exhaustion,’ says Professor of Literature John Sutherland at University College London. ‘It was a big subject. For those inspired to pick up Penguin’s tie-in edition of Parade’s End be warned: it’s 856 pages. At two minutes a page ... well, you can do the maths.’

Adapted by playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, Parade’s End was filmed across 150 sets and boasts a cast that also includes Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett and Anne-Marie Duff.

THE lavish drama, which makes its BBC2 debut on Friday, tells the story of wealthy statistician Christopher Tietjens, played by Sherlock star Cumberbatch, and his unhappy marriage to Sylvia, played by rising star Rebecca Hall. She is a cruel but beautiful socialite who is carrying a baby that may or may not be his. As Christopher’s world falls apart, he is given new hope by the love of a young suffragette, Valentine Wannop, played by newcomer Adelaide Clemens.

While you might assume that Sir Tom has injected all the racy excitement into the story, in fact, Ford Madox Ford’s original text is shot through with passion.

‘The BBC has sexed things up a little because Ford didn’t do overt sex scenes,’ says Alan Judd, a biographer of the author, who has seen the first episode. ‘But it is in keeping with the novel in the sense that in those days you closed the bedroom door.’

The action is very much based on Ford’s own life. Born in 1873, he eloped with his childhood sweetheart, Elsie Martindale, at the age of 20. Ford was to remain married to Elsie for the rest of his life – despite the fact that he had an affair with her sister, Mary. By the time he was 35, Ford had left his wife for the author Violet Hunt but Elsie refused to grant him a divorce.

Violet was a decade older than Ford and sexually confident – her past lovers included H.G. Wells and Somerset Maugham. Ford’s biographers have often suggested that the sexual allure of Sylvia in Parade’s End was based on Violet’s. Ford may not have included a naked bath scene, but he depicted Sylvia seducing Christopher in a railway carriage.

Together for approaching a decade, just like Christopher and Sylvia, the ultimate crisis between Ford and Violet came when he went off to fight in the First World War. Violet felt he had deserted her and was desperate to win him back – like Sylvia, she complained