Outraged BBC presenter Nick Knowles, declared that he was “baffled” over the “salacious tripe.” The DIY SOS host also queried why protagonist Pip’s great uncle Pumblechook has been “recast as a masochist” and his sister, Mrs Joe, as a “dominatrix running a torture service?”

While the ensuing furore even saw the denizens of the Dickens Fellowship being dragged into the fray, sexing up literary classics is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s often been a staple of TV adaptations of classic novels. But is it actually necessary to add extra raunch just to attract viewers? And in this post Me-Too era of intimacy co-ordinators, when it comes to sex on screen, is less actually more?

In defending the addition of steamy scenes to the adaptation of beloved classics, modern TV writers regularly employ the argument that the original authors were constrained from doing so by the
prevailing moral climate of the time. As a result, they had to keep things relatively chaste to avoid their books being banned. By adding extra embellishments to Great Expectations, Knight claimed that he tried to imagine what Dickens would do if he was writing the story now and had modern freedoms.

Somewhat predictably, as people devoted to the life and works of the writer, the Dickens Fellowship didn’t appear to get a thrill from seeing Pumblechook bent over the bed.

Honorary general secretary, Paul Graham, declared that he didn’t know if Dickens would ever have put in a spanking scene, as Pumblechook is “essentially a comic character with no hint of sexual deviancy”.

While it could be argued that adaptations of any book should be open to creative expression, Graham’s assertion that Knight sexed the series up to “generate viewership” may carry weight.

“Audiences are so used to seeing explicit scenes that they almost expect something a little steamy,” says film critic Cara O’Doherty.

“Traditionalists will never approve, so the additional spice isn’t for their benefit, it’s to sway people whose first choice might not be to watch Dickens on a Sunday night. Steven Knight, and others like him, argue that Dickens was a provocateur, to justify the addition of sex scenes.

“They assume that had it been acceptable during his time, he, too, would have filled his pages with explicit material. We will never know that, so it does leave directors to approach things with modern sensibilities if they are so inclined. Whether or not you think it should be done depends on personal preference.”

​Welsh television writer, Andrew Davies, has adapted numerous classics for TV and film, including Middlemarch (1995), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Fanny Hill (2007) and Sense and Sensibility (2008).

The octogenarian has developed a reputation for adding smut to the proceedings, and once famously declared that he inserts a bath scene into televised adaptations wherever possible.

He caused quite a stir when Colin Firth’s brooding Mr Darcy emerged from the lake in Pride and Prejudice with his transparent white shirt clinging sexily to his body – a scene that still resonates 30 years later, although it was not executed the way Davies intended.

Firth told Jonathan Ross that it had been written as a naked scene and he was meant to be wearing “precisely nothing.” He explained that the planned nudity didn’t go ahead because the BBC was “a bit prudish.”

“They had a problem because the writer had written that he [Mr Darcy] takes all of his kit off and jumps in the pond, and we all knew that that was going to be delicate for family viewing,” he said.

According to O’Doherty, a film version of the Jane Austin classic made a decade later makes an argument for less being more when it comes to expressing desire on screen.

“In Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice [2005], Matthew Macfadyen, as the dashing Mr Darcy, improvised a scene where his hand flexes after he helps Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet into a carriage,” she says. “The flex shows his frustration and pent-up passion. He desperately wants to hold her, but he can’t. It is not acceptable. Those few seconds are lust personified and send hearts racing more than most bodice-ripping scenes.”

While viewership figures show that we can’t get enough of sexed-up period dramas like Poldark and Versailles, purists can get hot and bothered when modest classics in print become raunch-fests on screen.

When his BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility debuted in 2008, Andrew Davies’s racy scenes drew the wrath of the fragrant members of the Jane Austen Society. Its then-chairman, Patrick Stokes, accused the Beeb of “lowering itself by degrading fine English literature in the battle for ratings.”

While the sexual elements of the 1811 tale of impoverished sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, are not explicit in the novel, Davies insisted that the sex is “just there if you read the book carefully enough.”

“There is a seduction of a schoolgirl,” he says. “She gets abandoned, pregnant; she has a baby. Two guys fight a duel about it. And nobody seems to remember that.

“This is a television show. If you are going to have a seduction, let’s see it. If you are going to have a fight between two blokes, let’s see it. If you are going to have a girl getting pregnant, let’s see the baby and invent her as a character so people can feel for her.”

The conundrum for screenwriters like Davies is that if they adhere to the coy suggestions of sexual activity and lustful desire in the works they’re adapting, the resulting screen versions can risk being dull and insipid. While readers can use their imaginations to read between the lines of a novel they’re consuming, an adapter’s creative licence can make the difference between the same tales sizzling or falling flat on their bustled bums on screen.

According to Dr Ellen Howley, assistant professor at the school of English at Dublin City University, moral outrage at diversions from the works of 18th and 19th century authors reveals more about our own perceptions of that era than anything else.

“On one hand, overt sex scenes go against our general view of ‘the past’ and its relationship to sexuality,” she says. “We tend to think of the Victorians as repressed, but many have argued, most famously French philosopher Michel Foucault, that they were paradoxically obsessed with sex.

“On the other, we probably allow for or even expect some degree of physical intimacy in contemporary TV and film, but the limits to this can change over time. Would we be shocked to see Darcy naked in a new adaptation? While Game of Thrones perhaps made explicit sex scenes more common on TV, the reaction to a woman whipping a man’s naked bottom may be more about our own expectations than the great ones of Dickens’ characters.”

​While there is something inherently sexy about corset-popping action and the unbuttoning of straining breeches, O’Doherty says sex scenes work best when they make sense, when the characters have a connection, and when it drives the story. She believes that savvy audiences can discern whether raunchy scenes are simply inserted for the sake of it or as a legitimate device to further the plot.

“Look at Bridgerton,” she says. “It’s not a classic as such, but the sex scenes are all based on connection, and that’s what makes the difference. The latest Lady Chatterley’s Lover [2022] has several sex scenes, all explicit, but none of them are there for shock value. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directs it, so perhaps it’s the female lens that makes it feel less seedy, but also, it’s believable – you have two characters drawn together by lust who have to be together physically.”

While they’re not adaptations of historic classics, period dramas like Tipping the Velvet (2002) and The Tudors (2007) have the advantage of being written for a relatively modern audience. As a result, they can incorporate sizzling scenes with impunity and without fear of offending die-hard literary fans.

In introducing his 1848 book, The History of Pendennis, novelist and author of Vanity Fair, William Thackeray, lamented that “society would not tolerate” a true-to-life depiction of a young man’s sex life.

“Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a man,” he complained. “We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper.”

On that basis, it seems that some writers of the classics acutely felt the publishing constraints placed on them by the prevailing modesty of the time. Perhaps they would have been delighted to see modern adaptations bringing sexual elements to the fore in ways that would not have been permitted for them.

Even, whisper it, Charles Dickens might have appreciated the freedom to be more honest and true-to-life in his depiction of sexual matters. After all, he was unable to come out and overtly state that Nancy was a prostitute in Oliver Twist, although the implication is pretty obvious, and he certainly couldn’t go into any detail.

Dickens may well have enjoyed the rumpus caused by the airing of Pumblechook’s spanking. Just don’t tell the Dickens Fellowship.