Nooky, nipples and The Forsytes Period dramas are too smutty

When it comes to sensational televisual scenes dressed up in pretty period clothing, The Rape Of Irene is up there with Wet Mr Darcy and the Death of Anne Boleyn, featuring in an episode of The Forsyte Saga broadcast by the BBC on Sunday evenings at the height of the Swinging Sixties. I remember as a seven-year-old being mystified about exactly what Soames had done to his wife; to my childish eyes they appeared to be having a rather heated squabble on a staircase. At school the next day, my playground cohort put our heads together to try to solve the mystery; “It was sex,” said one sophisticate. “What’s sex? Is it anything like sexy?” added a less savvy but, looking back, perhaps in her own way subversive Mixed Junior. “It was rape,” intoned a third. “What’s rape?” another asked. “Men push you on the ground and tear your clothes off,” the oracle declared, leaving the most vital element out, though whether from ignorance or delicacy, I’m pushed to decide.

In the light of the new Channel 5 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels, which starts tonight, it’s interesting to recall this TV landmark. It’s become part of pop-culture myth that contrary to what you’d expect, male viewers generally sympathised with Irene (probably because they fancied the actress Nyree Dawn Porter and felt protective of her) and women tended to be on the side of Soames (because Irene was considered a bit of a cow who went on to steal her best friend’s boyfriend and then, when he died, run off with his cousin). Rape in marriage wouldn’t become a criminal offence in England until 1991, and Irene’s assault at the hands of her husband was portrayed as something unfortunate but probably not a deal-breaker, especially as she had at least partly married him for his money. Even though this is obviously a bad and ridiculous thing, I do rather miss the days when everything that happened in television drama wasn’t necessarily a prompt for the next session of PMQs. I don’t think I could bear Stella Creasy’s snobbish little face as she informed us smugly that gammons, flag-shaggers and Brexit voters generally were far more likely on average to rape their wives than any other sort of man currently resident in these isles.

Three main things have happened to period drama since then: smut, diversity and rose-coloured glasses. The first we can mostly blame on screenwriter Andrew Davies, who couldn’t see a bustle without wanting to do something beastly to it. It’s a whopping three decades now since Elizabeth Bennett got an eyeful of a sopping Mr. Darcy; apparently Davies was persuaded to sex-up Pride and Prejudice by “a former student” who suggested he make it “really sexy” — try telling that to the judge these days! His romp became a TV phenomenon, attracting millions of viewers here and in the USA, winning two BAFTAs and an Emmy even though it had taken “years of perseverance and persuasion to get it on our screens” as apparently costume dramas had “gone quite out of fashion”. Sadly this enlightened state of affairs did not last. Davies was given carte blanche to get his grubby mitts all over a prurient parade of classic novels, even going so far as to jump into Austen’s grave for a quick necro-fumble when he inserted the dirty deed into her last unfinished novel Sanditon for a 2019 TV outing. A spry 82-years old at the time, Davies was at least admirably frank about his wicked ways: “I aim to please myself when writing these things… I write something that I would like to watch and I suppose the sexing it up thing comes in fairly naturally,” he said at a preview screening “If it’s not there I feel, well, that’s a shame — let’s put some in. I like to write it and I like to watch it.”

In 2009, Davies’ adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels were scrapped by the BBC in a bid to move away from “bonnet dramas”, which they have obviously since thought better of, as The Forsytes features more bonnets than your nearest car park. Maybe they just didn’t have enough nooky and nipples in them? Added smut has attracted an even larger proportion of daft women to period drama. What can seem common in contemporary clothing can always be classy if a few strategic ruffles are added; I doubt if men appreciating the winner of a wet T-shirt contest would keep cropping up in compilations of TV family favourites.

Then there’s diversity. At a time when we’re rightfully aware that black people in white societies had a rotten time in past centuries, it’s odd that they’re to be seen in Bridgerton and the like swanning around with enough jewels and titles to make your average member of the Almanach de Gotha emerald-green with envy. Like TV adverts featuring beautiful multi-racial couples sharing a latte and a laugh in kitchens bigger than the average flat, there’s a weird cake-consumed-and-also-kept thing going on here.

This leads us to the rose-coloured-glasses element inherent in period drama, which as a woman of working-class origin (I’m putting my self-righteous hat briefly on here) I find particularly galling. Because I just know that most of the women who watch these things — and come on, I’ve never met a man who voluntarily watches them alone — see themselves as the lady of the house, not the poor, exploited servant girl which they overwhelmingly would be. Downton Abbey in particular romanticised a time when working-class servant girls were little more than slaves, living under constant threat of sexual exploitation. As a youngster in the Seventies, I liked the wildly popular Upstairs, Downstairs (tellingly co-created by two actresses of working-class origin, Jean Marsh, who also starred as Rose, and Eileen Atkins) precisely because escaping the servant’s hall was seen as the ambition of any sane and spirited girl, with only those thoroughly gelded by the class system showing any loyalty to their aristocratic employers.

As for the new version of The Forsytes, the deathly word “re-imagining” has already cropped up in puff pieces, as has the drearily predictable promise of “Strong Women”; please, if a woman is described this way, I want to see her pull a truck along with her teeth, like on The World’s Strongest Man. I wonder if a line of Irene’s I remember from the original series will make it through, Female Friendship being such a televisual fetish these days. When she is caught out by her young protégé June having an affair with June’s fiancé, the younger girl yells something like “But I thought you were my friend!”, to which Irene retorts along the lines of “A woman of the world doesn’t have friends — she has lovers, and acquaintances”. I can’t see that flying with the sisters-over-misters ethos of today. One of the producers, Damien Timmer, has po-facedly said that “we wanted to take a magnifying glass to this extremely wealthy family who are the 1%”, while writer Debbie Horsfield has tutted “We were clear from the word go that we weren’t going to do a straight adaptation of these male-centric novels”. She previously adapted Poldark, which made me consider that it’s a jolly good job that men are accommodating enough to write these big, sprawling, male-centric sagas that we ladies can then tinker with, providing that essential woman’s touch, fluffing up the contemporary cushions on these huge slabs of original material.

I sound irascible, but to be fair, I am impatient with most portrayals of women on television these days, with their seemingly contradictory message that we’re both Poor Things and that We Can Do Anything — make your mind up! But even more, I miss the days when there wasn’t a lecture, or a scolding of some kind, wrapped up inside every last TV drama, like a very un-fun Kinder Surprise. It’s been a trying year, and I don’t think that I could face the sight/sound of Keir Starmer standing up in the House of Commons and advising us to watch this new documentary series (as he famously mis-genred the TV series Adolescence), The Forsytes, about how lucky we are to live in a time when Ordinary Working Families don’t have to act as a servant class to the rich, fetching and carrying for them for a pittance. Because we import people to do that for us now — and that’s progress.

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