Press obsession with the lesbian scenes in the new BBC drama Tipping the Velvet has been branded "homophobic" by the daughter of Dame Diana Rigg, one of its leading stars.
Rachael Stirling said tabloid reporters had been acting like "piranhas around a rotting corpse" simply because there were explicit scenes of women enjoying sex together.
"I think if anything I had underestimated people's homophobia," said Stirling.
"The tabloids have been like piranhas round a rotting corpse. There's no doubt [my character] Nan's process of self-discovery is the most challenging part for a young actress I have ever read, but then you get all these male journalists asking you what it's like to kiss a girl."
"I just think, 'you're a bloody man, you tell me!'. Everyone is fixated on the fact it involves two birds snogging."
Tipping the Velvet has been adapted for BBC2 by veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies, who invited newspapers' interest by openly bragging the drama was "absolutely filthy" at a recent press launch.
The lesbian storyline has guaranteed hundreds of column inches in both the tabloids and the broadsheets and the BBC privately feels it will have achieved something if it provokes a tirade of abuse in the Daily Mail, which has a history of attacking controversial TV programmes.
In a preview in the Sun, the paper described the sex scenes as "sizzling" and said the BBC was ready for "thousands of viewer complaints." Stirling's character, it said, "romps her way through London with various busty girls, becoming a sex slave on the way".
But Sarah Waters, who wrote the novel on which the series is based, said: "Of course the BBC are talking it up and Andrew is certainly talking it up as being quite, well filthy - but... I just don't know.
"There's a phenomenon in romance writing called 'URST', which stands for unresolved sexual tension," Waters told the Daily Telegraph.
"When I was writing Tipping, I thought it was going to be a very sexual book, there's not going to be much URST. But in the end there's a lot of URST. I think it's a lesbian thing."
Tipping the Velvet, which also stars Spooks' Keeley Hawes, begins on BBC2 tomorrow night.
