A date with Desperate Romantics

Desperate Romantics, the BBC's new Victorian romp with the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, combines alpha-fop revelry with brazen historical liberty-taking. What did you make of the easel lovers?

"In the mid-19th century, a group of young men challenged the art establishment of the day. The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were inspired by the real world, yet took imaginative licence in their art. This story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inventive spirit."

Flash, bang, wallop: what a disclaimer. Here, scrawled in Auntie's finest Heritage Whimsy font across an authentically aged canvas backdrop, was the perfect preamble to Peter "Occupation" Bowker's mischievous period romp; a rollicking gambol through a fictionalised Victorian London with a narrative as contemptuous of historical reverence as its rambunctious subjects were.

Disclaimer duly delivered, the episode opened with a shot of a strapping dandy sprinting along a busy thoroughfare, coat tails aflutter. This was one Fred Walters (Sam Crane), a fictional interloper whose enthusiastic narration provides the perfect frame through which to view the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's monocle-popping antics.

Visibly, gaspingly, in awe of the brotherhood, Walters seals his friendship by assisting them in the pursuit of both a) a communal, redheaded lady muse with which to defrost the thus-far unimpressed art establishment, and b) the patronage of pre-eminent art critic John Ruskin (Tom Hollander), a prissy proto-Sewell fond of purple aphorisms ("beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts will cease to be enjoyed as beauty" etc), and terrified of sex.

So who are these bowler-toppling bounders?

There is Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Aidan Turner), hirsute carouser, swaggering braggart ("I'm half Italian, half mad!"), compulsive stroker of wenches' breastbones and, as the brotherhood's unofficial frontman, the painter most likely to fall to his knees at the end of a successful exhibition and bellow "THANKYOUWEMBLEY" to the bow tie-spinning consternation of "The Man".

There is William Holman Hunt (Rafe Spall), a tense, upset sort given to explosive topless punching-bag sessions ("BOWBOWBOWBOW!"), his nipples oscillating with some manner of (thus far unspecified) religious/sexual guilt. And there is John Millais (Samuel Barnett), a prodigiously gifted sort whose enormous talent and extreme youth attracts the scorn of his fellow 'hoods ("You are no sexual threat whatsoever!" guffaws Rossetti, eyebrows waggling wolfishly).

Though united by their desire to place a whoopee cushion beneath the establishment's complacent buttocks, the PRB's association is underpinned by an intense mutual competitiveness.

In one of last night's pivotal scenes, for example, Hunt received unexpected fellatio from a prostitute before nutting Rossetti while going "HWNYAAAAH". But it's their obsession with hot muse/"hat shop stunner" Lizzie Siddal (Amy Manson) that most threatens to upset their apple cart; her fragile, fluttering beauty as big a danger to their association as any number of one-star reviews.

Other notable features?

There was a knees-up/breeches-down jingle that accompanied the brotherhood's more lively moments, alerting us to imminent fisticuffs and/or naked fumbleage. There were numerous shots of the brotherhood striding abreast, a vaguely irksome motif that also revealed Rossetti's hat to be by some margin the largest (an intentional nod to his formidable sexual prowess? Possibly).

Original article here.