The Desperate Romantics' muses pose problems in episode two

This week, the simmering sexual tension between various characters exploded into the spontaneous bouts of passion that Victorians seemed to be so well versed in. How was it for you?

What larks, Dante, what larks! Hour two and mutiny barged into the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's (PRB) art-party, grumbling about the rain and demanding a cocktail umbrella for its laudanum and cranberry.

While last week's events hinted at an undercurrent of tension bubbling beneath all the high-fives and yo bro'-ing, this was where it all began to go wrong. The cause? Lizzie Siddal: Royal Academy-approved stunner, communal model/sitter and probable user of Clairol Nice 'n Easy in Consumptive Victorian Muse. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so smitten he started to call her Sid. Yes, Sid. As in James. Or Little. Clearly, here was a Romance for the Ages.

"Oh, Sid, Sid, Sid," he mooned, the camera zooming in on his authentically honking 19th century fingers, as they rubbed listlessly at something hopeless in charcoal.

What with Dante and John Millais squabbling among themselves, William "Maniac" Hunt had little to do but look world-weary in the shadows, shaking his head and going "mnyeh" whenever a PRB punch-up appeared imminent.

In an effort to redress the balance, he briefly had guilty sex on a piano with muse/strumpet Annie, his eyebrows forming a tortured W, while her uneducated buttocks slapped out a rudimentary approximation of Chopsticks. "I want to buy you manners," he told her later, sotto voce, as if he was talking about tights or something. This was his way of asking her out. Which was nice. Not least because he'd spent most of the evening telling the Royal Academy what a miserable tart she was. Annie/Eliza Doolittle gurgled bewilderedly by way of response, thus setting the scene for in-no-way-sexist future scenes in which Hunt teaches her the alphabet, naked, on all fours, behind an unusually large euphonium.

Lizzie/Sid had also experienced an epiphany. Having survived a near-drowning in Millais's bathtub, her emotional corset had come undone. "There's no going back!" she cooed as Rossetti read her a "sexy" poem. Duly untethered, they banged frenziedly as the stanzas flew.

Elsewhere, Mrs Ruskin discovered her husband's stash of pornographic sketches. Quietly furious, the asexual ninny offered her up as a model to Millais, whose left eyebrow hovered saucily. Mrs Ruskin stared at his bow-tie and did a sex face. Her husband scratched his chin and wondered what to have for supper. The end.

Repressed nipple count: Three (two rising slowly from a bathtub and one trembling in terror prior to the aforementioned couplet-based coupling).

Symbolic hat watch: Dante spent most of the episode in a state of wanton, hair-tossing hatlessness (subtext: he has an erection). Fred's stovepipe/bowler contraption, meanwhile, has grown in relation to his standing in the PRB. Last week, it was an unassuming five-incher. Here, it teetered like a jug of tar balanced on a tennis ball. Evidently, any more of this "doing favours for narcissistic painters" nonsense and he'll be wearing a silo, come Michaelmas.

Original article here.