A LIFE OF SIN FOR LADY SYBIL

Downton’s Jessica Brown Findlay and Mum’s Lesley Manville join forces in a scandalously watchable drama

Modern-day puritans need only look back through history to realise that ours is an age of moral rectitude compared with the supposedly respectable past.

Just take a peek beneath the genteel surface of 18th Century London. The capital was brimming over with bawdiness and cruelty, and as many as one in five women sold their bodies to survive.

There was even a directory of the capital’s brothels, the notorious Harris’s List Of Covent Garden Ladies, which described the girls in explicit detail.

This is the real-life background to the decadent demi-monde of Harlots, a provocative yet deliciously entertaining eight-part period drama with a dazzling, female-led cast.

Dominating the saga are two madams, at war for the fortunes to be made from lusty clients blessed with rather more in the way of wealth than brains.

Margaret Wells (Samantha Morton) is determined to move up in the world and open her establishment on new premises in the fashionable area of Soho.

It’s something of a family business, with one daughter, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay, above, with Hugh Skinner as Sir George Howard), already roped in and the younger one about to have her virtue auctioned off to the highest bidder.

But standing in the way of Wells’s ambitions is the glacially imperious Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville, right), who will stop at nothing to crush her rival. Also starring are Hollywood actress Liv Tyler and Tim McInnerny (Blackadder).

Inspired by historian Hallie Rubenhold’s research into Harris’s List, the series has its fair share of shocking scenes but is also unashamedly watchable. The inimitable style – rip-roaring camp spiced up with the occasional moment that’ll blow your periwig off – is blissfully free of the artificially stilted dialogue that can plague period dramas. And don’t be alarmed if you experience an unnerving sense of déjà vu: Harlots was first broadcast in 2017, winning acclaim far out of proportion to the handful of viewers who saw it on the digital backwater of ITV Encore, and is now airing again for a wider BBC audience.

A racy William Hogarth painting come to life, this is the jaw-dropping truth about Georgian England.