Patrick Freyne on TV: ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is like a less sexy version of ‘Carry On the Class System’

If Mellors, the groundskeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover, had a Tinder bio it would read: "Hi ladies, I'm a grunting, glowering brute who lives in a shack in the woods. My penis has a name. Also: I may have black lung. Likes: long walks on the beach."

Mellors is so dreamy. What woman doesn’t fantasise about a skulking backwoodsman who has named his genitals?

The new Jed Mercurio adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Sunday, BBC 1) opens by interspersing shots of coal-mining class struggle and sodden trench warfare with the courtship, wedding and love-making of Sir Clifford (James Norton) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger).

These are all, the film makers seem to be suggesting, versions of the same thing. And embittered class warrior Mellors (Richard Madden) attacks all activities with the same brow-furrowed singularity of purpose. He’s a tryer, God love him. When, early in the programme, Sir Clifford is blown up by a German grenade, Mellors looms over him in the trench and takes command of the unit. When a badly injured Sir Clifford returns home and hires Mellors as groundskeeper, Mellors takes over from him in attending to other tasks, such as shirtless pheasant cultivation and wife-pleasuring.

The latter comes about slightly inexplicably. The short version: lonely Lady Constance Chatterley befriends an eccentric tramp who lives in the woods and with whom she has adventures. It's basically a sexy version of Stig of the Dump, or, if you like, a less sexy version of Carry On the Class System.

There’s not really much else to the plot of DH Lawrence’s novel. Literary novels aren’t as dependent on plot as television drama is, which really makes them unsuitable for adaptation. And the dynamics of the drama are all wrong. No contemporary viewer can feel the visceral cognitive dissonance Lawrence’s original readers may have felt about the across-the-divide love. Without such a codified class system, it’s a little hard to appreciate the melodrama (Yes, my wife spends a lot of time with our groundskeeper and, now you mention it, I’m not sure why a three bedroom terraced house in Marino needs a groundskeeper, but that’s a totally different situation).

Nothing says sexy like kazoo

Few viewers today are going to be particularly surprised by Lawrence’s uninhibited attitude to sex. The programme-makers could, I suppose, dial up the sexiness a notch (“Hey Lady C, what say we put on these gimp-masks and get some of the pheasants involved?”) but if anything, they’ve dialled it down. The sex-scenes are tastefully dull, moodily lit and accompanied by a stately string section rather than a slap-bass, kazoo and slide-whistle (that would have been my choice).

Most of the novel’s sexually frank dialogue has been excised, although Mellors does channel contemporary aristocrat Sir Mixalot when describing Chatterley’s arse as “a bottom that would hold the world up” (Lady’s got back).

Furthermore, without the novel’s access to inner lives, Constance just seems like a vapid upper-class flibbertigibbet and Mellors a gruff working-class grouch. Sir Clifford is the most interesting and heartbreaking character, which denies the lovelorn Constance any sense of romantic justification (Oh, you’ve abandoned your disabled husband to have sex in a shed? You truly are one of life’s heroes).

Sir Clifford turns a blind eye to Constance’s convention-defying rumpy-pumpy because he is filled with shame and wants an heir. He drives around in a little motorised car, talks at length about coal mining and is totally, comically oblivious to the glowering sulks of his chippie, oversexed employee.

The most dramatic scene is one in which, after discovering Constance is pregnant, Mellors has to push Sir Clifford’s broken-down jalopy. He does so with so many loud, wheezing, grunts, I initially suspected he’d transferred his amorous feelings from posh ladies to small motorised vehicles. Sadly, this was not the case. He just had angry asthma.

On discovering the identity of his cuckolder, Sir Clifford has a tantrum. Constance rushes to the woods to find Mellors spouting some early-20th century luddism about cyborgs. “I’ve a fear of putting children in the world,” he says, “this machine world, with machine men.”

Constance is more in love with the big crazy loon than ever. So there’s a class confrontation between Sir Clifford and Mellors during which Mellors bravely attacks his disabled rival, and the lovers run off together with Sir Clifford shouting after them: “Take her and yours – and mine, mine is the world.”

It's no longer Sir Clifford's world. Now is the era of American hegemony. On Celebrity Big Brother when I check in (every evening, TV3), an American faction of minor celebrities are in the ascendant after the short brutal reign of King Bobby Davro (look, I'm just typing what I see and hear in front of me). Daniel Baldwin and Chris Ellison have been banished to the badlands and house leader, "President" Fatman Scoop, yogaing model Janice Dickinson, reality TV harridan Farrah Abraham and former porn actress Jenna Jameson control the food and water supply in a grim premonition of what's to come for western society.

I suspect, in fact, that Big Brother is how government game-theorists work out the psychological ramifications of future policy decisions. There are tears. There is passive aggression. There is active aggression. There is sociopathy. It is a fully realised idiocracy.

“There are people in here that I don’t think are built for war,” says President Scoop, darkly. “I want those people to leave because it’s going to get nasty . . . when the walls start coming down, bro, if your mind isn’t there, you’re not going to be able to take what’s being thrown at you.”

I believe that’s also his Tinder bio.