Sex scenes in a new BBC adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are so explicit it is verging on pornography, its producer has admitted.
The steamy DH Lawrence novel has been made into a 90-minute drama, and will show gamekeeper Oliver Mellors romping with a naked Lady Chatterley.
Producer Serena Cullen said the X-rated scenes in the one-off adaptation are so graphic that they are almost not suitable for broadcast.
‘I have never seen anyone do the things Mellors, the gamekeeper, does to Lady Chatterley. I’m not sure what more we could have shown unless it was porn.
‘I’ve watched lots of Hollywood films where the girl wears a bra in bed – we didn’t do that. So apart from having them have sex starkers, which you wouldn’t be able to put on any channel, I think we are quite rude.’
Despite the particularly graphic description, the drama’s write Jed Mercurio hinted that it would be more chaste than previous television versions of the novel.
He 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.
