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No sex, no rude words. This Lady Chatterley was a tedious turn off: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last weekend's TV

By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:36 EST, 6 September 2015 | Updated: 04:16 EST, 7 September 2015

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Lady Chatterley's Lover

Rating:

Great novels pass the test of ages. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not one of them. There isn’t a paragraph in D. H. Lawrence’s infamous 1928 book, banned for more than 30 years, that has a smidgin of relevance today.

It is a book about the gulf between servants and the aristocracy, and whether women have a right to a sex life.

The text is spattered with four-letter words and, for middle-class readers who obtained smuggled copies in brown paper covers during the Thirties, it was the first time many had seen these Anglo-Saxon profanities in print.

Lady Chatterley's Lover: Holliday Grainger as Constance Chatterley and Richard Madden as Oliver Mellors

But none of that matters a jot in 2015. The average reality TV ‘star’ utters the F-word more times in one sentence than gamekeeper Mellors in the entire 300 pages.

These days, intimate female sex issues are discussed on lunchtime television in Loose Women.

And the upstairs-downstairs divide is a staple of Downton, Mr Selfridge and other frothy dramas.

That didn’t leave writer Jed Mercurio with much to work with in his adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (BBC1).

He decided to leave out the swearing, because it sounds so commonplace now: Mellors (Richard Madden) let slip just one rude word, which gave her ladyship a fit of the giggles.

Then he decided he might as well leave out the sex, too. There was a bit of soft-focus fumbling with buttons while the violins swelled ecstatically, and that was your lot.

Lawrence’s novel was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Mercurio’s screen version could have been done under the Trade Descriptions Act.

He decided to leave out the swearing, because it sounds so commonplace now: Mellors (Richard Madden) let slip just one rude word, which gave her ladyship a fit of the giggles

All that remained of the original was the class hatred, and this was thrown in by the shovelful.

This 90-minute, one-off adaptation began with an explosion down at t’pit, where Mellors stomped round in a strop, glowering at the local capitalists with fine socialist contempt for their fancy ways.

The villainous Lord Chatterley kept reminding us what a beastly, heartless lot the upper classes were, with lines such as: ‘She’s a servant, she’s not a human being!’

Some of the dialogue seemed to be there just to emphasise what a truly rotten writer Lawrence could be.

Holliday Grainger, playing the heroine, first appeared at a stately home ball, and her opening line was so bad it landed with a crash like a falling chandelier. ‘Everyone seems so desperate to appear joyful,’ she said, ‘one senses only their despair.’

Without the sex or the bad language, and with so much emphasis on class, what we ended up with was a third-rate version of Pride And Prejudice: this was the story of how Miss Snootypants met Mr Grumpy and couldn’t admit she loved him until the final scene.

Jane Austen’s much-loved novel has been retold for cinema and TV many times, and new versions will continue to delight future generations.

Lady Chatterley has also been adapted for screen many times, at least six — and with luck this will be the last.

The Trials Of Jimmy Rose

Rating:

The Trials Of Jimmy Rose (ITV) also turned out to be a miserable disappointment. With Ray Winstone and Amanda Redman leading the cast, it promised to be action-packed, emotional drama.

Instead, it consists of short, frantic bursts strung together with long, boring stretches of nothing.

The camera follows Winstone as he shuffles through his house, standing for minutes on end in front of the jukebox or the pool table.

The Trials Of Jimmy Rose also turned out to be a miserable disappointment. With Ray Winstone and Amanda Redman (pictured) leading the cast, it promised to be action-packed, emotional drama - but failed to deliver

He nips outside, yells at someone or has a punch-up — and then it’s back to the endless mooching around.

Huge gaps are starting to open up in the plot. Former bank robber Jimmy Rose can’t turn a corner without bumping into an old member of his gang or a copper who helped put him away.

And he is developing supernatural powers — able to materialise in a room without warning, and spend all night on a garden chair in a lawless housing estate without attracting the attention of the rozzers or the local yobs.

At least it isn’t pretentious. Unlike Lady C, which is still studied at universities, Jimmy Rose doesn’t claim to be anything more than what it is: a slice of tosh on a Sunday night.