Da Vinci’s Demons
Fox, 2013-2015
Oh look, it’s Leonardo da Vinci in a pleather blouson, saying “gnnyaaarrr” and doing sexy horse nostrils as he cartwheels through a 15th-century Florence thick with pubic hair, CGI hang gliders, nuns, breasts, nuns with breasts, mumbling mystics, eye-rolling popes, nipples, the bits around nipples, and lines such as “begone you artless fuckwit”. Such was the gist of this filmed-in-Swansea “historical fantasy”, its sole aim seemingly to place a whoopee cushion beneath history’s bum cheeks before running away, laughing.
Typical scene Da Vinci (Tom Riley) doing gun-fingers at walls while bellowing himself to a juddering Renaissance climax in a set that was once a car parts factory off the A483.
Sauce factor 3½
The Borgias
Sky Atlantic, 2011-2013
Nothing says history like Jeremy Irons shouting “whore” in a mitre. And so it proved with Neil Jordan’s potboiler, a Hungary-Ireland-Canada co-production that took the story of the titular Renaissance dynasty, then shook it by the ankles until its brain fell out. Cue thrusting pontiffs, bums-out bishops, urinating monkeys and the belief that historical veracity is something to be bent over and humped, vigorously, behind an organza curtain (Dunelm’s Ye Papal Gits range, £3.99 a yard), preferably while shouting “whore” in a mitre.
Typical scenes The Pope (Irons, obviously) stifling a yawn as a topless flibbertigibbet begs to be divested of sin (“WHIP ME, MY LORD”); pouting siblings Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia enjoying some light incest on a 15th-century picnic blanket.
Sauce factor 4
Desperate Romantics
BBC2, 2009
An uncharacteristically non-awful entry in the genre, by dint of it being a bouncing jalopy of woohoo, and not, as is traditional among its more historically careful peers, a hearse containing some David Starkey opinions on bums. Centered on the antics of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it plonked easel-happy carousers Aiden Turner and Rafe Spall among the galleries and fleshpots of Victorian London, tossed in some euphemisms for balls, then retreated to a privet hedge to phwoarr at the ensuing hoo-hah.
Typical scene Turner burying his face between a strumpet’s jugs and saying “wubba wubba”. Spall frolicking with his muse on a piano, his jowls flapping like windsocks as her bumcheeks slap out a rudimentary approximation of Chopsticks.
Sauce factor 3
Tipping the Velvet
BBC2, 2002
“Hrmmph nude tsk licence-fee tut nipples gnnn!” spluttered the headlines, gnashing themselves into a tumescent froth at the temerity of a series that not only depicted impressionable Victorian fillies enjoying doing it but, what’s more, enjoying doing it without recourse to menfolk, by jove. Fifteen years on, Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’s tale of lesbian self-discovery remains a rarity among its becostumed bedfellows, in that it delivered the monocle-fogging usuals – Grade II-listed frottage, tits etc – sweetly, with a brain, and characters you didn’t immediately want to see choking to death on a cravat.
Typical scene Anna Chancellor straddling a leather dildo to an accompaniment of music-hall oompah while, off-screen, Middle England vented its outrage by standing behind a tuba and wanking.
Sauce factor 4½
The Tudors
BBC2, 2007-2010
The ne plus ultra of gratuitous bygones boffery. Among this series’ dizzying roster of unwarranted set-piece bangings: observational four-poster sex (“No one has calves like yours”), determined-family-planning-in-a-stool-closet sex (“We will have a son”) and shouting, congratulatory sex next to startled 16th-century geese sex (“I LOVE YOUR NECK”). The upshot? History so volcanically stupid you had to prick your telly with a fork, like a baked potato, in order to let the steam out.
Typical scene Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) engaged in interminable thrashing congress with some luckless lovely, his hairless buttocks jackhammering with such ferocity they’re little more than a gluteal blur, like paté smeared across the windscreen of a Renault.
Sauce factor 5
