From orgies to marathon sex scenes: how did period drama get so raunchy? | Television

Outlander first sizzled our screens in 2014, with Vulture quickly declaring that the interval drama had “one of the best intercourse on tv”. Its story of second world struggle nurse Claire (Caitriona Balfe) time-travelling to 18th-century Scotland and falling in love with clansman Jamie (Sam Heughan) definitely earned the accolade. The marriage evening episode options Claire reaching such an explosive orgasm that it requires smelling salts for viewers to get by. There’s a knee-trembling “fort cunnilingus” scene and, at one level, the extraordinary second when Claire saves Jamie’s life by masturbating him. It has proved so fashionable that in 2026 its eighth (and last) season will air.Within the final 12 months we’ve had exhibits resembling Carême, a few Napoleonic-era movie star chef who likes foreplay with a dollop of whipped cream, and orgy-filled Mary & George, concerning the lover of James I of England/James VI of Scotland. Outlander has even spawned a prequel, Blood of My Blood, concerning the entwining tales of Claire’s and Jamie’s mother and father, two {couples} who additionally get pleasure from time journey and intercourse. Certain sufficient, there’s a romp towards a desk lower than half an hour in, a dizzying quantity of hand brushes and a intercourse scene that clocks up practically 10 lengthy minutes. How did interval dramas get so raunchy?Thirty years in the past, issues had been rather more chaste. The long-lasting second of Andrew Davies’s 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pleasure and Prejudice that shook up the style didn’t even contain nudity – simply Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy rising from a lake in a soaking white shirt.Firth’s chemistry with Jennifer Ehle, who performed Elizabeth Bennet, was simple: the 2 began relationship in actual life throughout filming. Nobody has intercourse within the sequence, however Davies wrote in scenes to point out the hormonal younger characters’ physicality and sexuality, and appeared for “any authentic excuse to get a few of that package off”. It definitely gained over followers: final 12 months, the shirt Firth wore offered at public sale for £25,000. One professor even instructed the BBC that the sequence has “nearly usurped the unique novel within the minds of the general public”.Seven years later, Davies shocked the nation by writing a drama that makes Pleasure and Prejudice appear to be CBeebies: an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Victorian-set lesbian novel Tipping the Velvet. Nan (Rachael Stirling) is an oyster lady who’s enchanted by androgynous stage performer Kitty (Keeley Hawes). She joins her act in bohemian London and so they begin a sexual relationship. It divided critics, with one calling the primary intercourse scenes “uninteresting”. He ought to have caught round for episode two.Anna Chancellor enters as dominatrix aristocrat Woman Diana – the proud proprietor of a large dildo. “It was leather-based, wasn’t it?” asks Chancellor after I remind her of it over video name. “Was [its size] plausible?” She has by no means seen the sequence and says she must be “actually previous” to abdomen watching herself in it. Filming was bodily troublesome because the digicam went spherical and spherical whereas she rocked on Nan’s lap. That stated, she would “fairly prefer to play [Diana] once more”, and provides: “It gave me an enormous lesbian following, which I used to be thrilled with. It’s a privilege.”The present was groundbreaking for queer intercourse on display screen, however Chancellor makes the purpose that it was directed by a straight man (Geoffrey Sax). “I feel they wouldn’t try this now,” she ponders. Intimacy coordinators weren’t a factor again then both. Despite the fact that she admits to a few of their duties being extra cringey than really capturing intercourse scenes (like softly touching one another’s face and hair), she says an excellent one may also help map out the characters’ bodily relationships extra convincingly: “It’s the way you get there.”No details connected … Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII) and Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors. {Photograph}: BBC/SonyBodice-and-breeches rippers quickly took off. In 2007, all historic truth went out of the window when Jonathan Rhys Meyers performed Henry VIII as a hunky, brunette intercourse god in The Tudors. Inside 4 minutes of the opening episode, Henry and Catherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy) had been bonking. Tons of of outraged followers complained it was too Americanised, dumbed down and hypersexual. “These folks didn’t have TVs, they didn’t have automobiles, they didn’t have iPods. That they had intercourse. What else do you assume they did?” Meyers as soon as stated, clearly fed up of defending it on press excursions.Anyway, Henry was left within the mud in 2015, when a topless Aidan Turner scythed his means on to prime time in Poldark. It set pulses racing to such an extent that Turner got here to resent it: “It started to overshadow the present and that pissed off me. It simply obtained boring,” he admitted of a scene that will go on to be voted TV second of the 12 months.Fantasy … Aidan Turner preparing for his topless scene in Poldark. Composite: PA/ BBC/Everett/Rex FeaturesBut it wasn’t the one scene to set off debate. A scene by which Poldark forcefully kisses ex-lover Elizabeth (Heida Reed), who pushes him away and says “no” till lastly conceding to intercourse was criticised as a “rape fantasy”. Poldark isn’t the one interval drama to function problematic intercourse scenes. Outlander is regularly pressed on its repeated use of brutal rape as a story device – which they put all the way down to this being a actuality that may’t be completely ignored: rape solely turned a statutory offence in England and Wales in 1956 (and marital rape wasn’t included till 1991). In Scotland, rape was an offence in frequent legislation solely till 2009. Catriona Balfe additionally justifies it by saying: “Now we have an issue in our society with sexual assault, and it’s mirrored in our storytelling.”With TV audiences turning into much less conservative and streaming networks providing new freedoms, interval bonkbusters went wild within the early 2010s, from The Borgias (which featured an incest scene) to Versailles (“4 racy scenes in simply 17 minutes!” cried the Every day Mail). Like many of the exhibits earlier than them, they had been largely written and directed by males. In addition they practically all the time featured white leads; interval drama has all the time had an issue with range. Nonetheless, coinciding with the #MeToo motion, a spate of good feminine storytellers had been about to carry nuance and lift the bar as soon as extra.‘We by no means stated titillating’ … Jessica Brown Findlay as Charlotte (centre) in Harlots. {Photograph}: Liam Daniel/Hulu/Everett Assortment Inc/AlamyIn 2017, Alison Newman and Moira Buffini co-created Harlots, a Georgian-set drama with a various solid, starring Lesley Manville and Samantha Morton as warring brothel homeowners (it has not too long ago loved a brand new lease of life in Netflix’s High 10 chart). Set in a time when intercourse work was extremely beneficial to the financial system, it’s, in fact, full of graphic scenes. However don’t conflate intercourse with “horny”; Newman even bristles on the phrase after I point out it to her over the telephone. It was unofficially banned from the writing room, and that wasn’t all: “We by no means stated titillating.”The present was made completely by girls from what Newman calls “the whore’s eye view”, following “a kind of reverse Bechdel check” with not more than two males in a room. Intercourse was a job for these girls and it wanted to really feel actual: it’s usually boring or humiliating, typically fulfilling and at occasions harmful. There’s additionally barely any nudity as a result of undressing took too lengthy.Nonetheless, there are uncommon moments when intercourse is an act of affection or ardour, resembling when Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) sleeps with male intercourse employee Daniel Marney (Rory Fleck Byrne) after a season spent constructing a friendship. “Charlotte clearly had a really difficult relationship with intercourse, so for her to let go like that or make herself weak – it was an enormous second.” That’s certainly what makes intercourse, nicely, horny (sorry Newman!). “The drama is within the want – and what occurs earlier than and after the act is most fascinating … If it’s simply a few folks shagging, then what’s the purpose?”Intimate second … Sophie Rundle as Ann Walker and Suranne Jones as Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack. {Photograph}: Aimee Spinks/BBC/Lookout Level/HBOAround the identical time, Sally Wainwright was engaged on Gentleman Jack, a drama about Nineteenth-century Yorkshire landowner Anne Lister (Suranne Jones) who’s extensively thought-about the primary trendy lesbian, and her relationship with Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle). Tabloids referred to as the same-sex scenes “steamy” and “stunning”, however numerous care was taken with them. “We used the digicam to come back in on us and discover intimate moments,” Jones stated. “By the top, me and Sophie had been like two nans with a cup of tea. Like, covers off, hanging out. And it was nice.”Andrew Davies additionally created one other barrier-breaking adaptation of Austen – her unfinished novel Sanditon. This time, he went so far as including in intercourse scenes. “I write one thing that I wish to watch,” he stated. “And I suppose the sexing it up factor is available in pretty naturally.” Not solely that, a scene displaying the bums of two nude male characters going for a swim – which they’d have executed in these days – raised the problem of objectification. “Are there completely different requirements? So what if there are,” star Kris Marshall stated. “Is it the objectification of males after we’ve had the objectification of girls for thus lengthy?” (A 2016 report discovered that feminine nudity was nearly 3 times as possible as male in Hollywood movies.)However raunch is available in all kinds. For a lot of viewers, some of the erotic scenes on tv in recent times was Andrew Scott in silk pyjamas dancing to T Rex’s Dandy within the Underworld. He performed Lord Merlin in Emily Mortimer’s adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s Thirties coming-of-age story The Pursuit of Love. It was a casting masterstroke. Merlin sticks his center finger up, slinks round and – in a flooring second – abruptly kisses one of many lovely younger issues, wipes his mouth and spins her away. “That was all him, he simply delivered,” Mortimer tells me over a name. “It simply got here so simply, and he went for it. He has precisely the correct quantity of allure, fearlessness and a sort of twinkle.” It was shot throughout lockdown and the very first thing Scott stated to her after filming that scene was: “I simply really feel so fortunate to be at a celebration!”The response of Lily James’s teenage character Linda, who’s watching from the sidelines in a ballroom, mirrors our blushing at dwelling: she is filled with lust and eager for life to start out, and finds Merlin’s sexual liberation nearly too painfully horny to observe. “Lily did it so nicely,” says Mortimer. “It’s hilarious but additionally sort of heartbreaking and really recognisable.”Smaller moments actually do have the ability to fluster a nation. Regency-era Bridgerton is likely one of the largest and raciest exhibits right now – and a celebration of how far we have now come relating to intercourse in interval drama, with numerous characters having numerous intercourse that’s each a hoot to observe and all the time feminine centered. It additionally gave life to the extra X-rated spin-off Queen Charlotte (she did have 15 infants, in any case). However, arguably, it’s Regé-Jean Web page’s Duke of Hastings merely licking a spoon that went viral and have become Bridgerton’s most definitive scene.A spot of spooning … Regé-Jean Web page because the Duke of Hastings in Bridgerton. {Photograph}: PRFor now, although, it’s full steam forward in Blood of My Blood. Harriet Slater, who performs Jamie’s mom Ellen, tells me the chemistry learn with Jamie Roy (her onscreen forbidden lover Brian) was “in contrast to some other”. Roy says: “The sparks do fly.” And there’s that epic intercourse scene, whose capturing concerned turning raunchiness into one thing as extremely choreographed and rehearsed as a stunt or dance. Generally, although, you’ll be able to have an excessive amount of sexual pressure. “On the very first take I burst out laughing! I obtained instructed off very swiftly,” smiles Roy. “In the event you take it too significantly, you get too drained!” provides Slater. However did they pull it off? “Smashed it.”Outlander: Blood of My Blood is on MGM+ by way of Prime Video on 9 August. This text was amended on 1 August 2025. An earlier model stated that rape solely turned unlawful within the UK in 1956. That is when it turned a statutory offence in English and Welsh legal legislation; it had lengthy been a legal offence in frequent legislation.