30 July 2015, The Tablet

Gilded youth


 
The BBC’s Bloomsbury drama (July 27) has already acquired a dubious accolade from the Mail on Sunday, which asked, rhetorically, whether it was “the raunchiest TV show ever”. The answer is “no”. True, there were six sexual episodes in the first episode, but nothing that would merit even a PG certificate in the cinema. In any case, it is difficult to see how you would tell the story of the Bloomsbury group without some depiction of sexual activity. You couldn’t stop at the bedroom door; they certainly didn’t (the first such incident involved the painter Duncan Grant and a male stranger, in an alleyway). Besides, all these sexual acts were different in quality and nature, revealing of character and attitude, and far removed from the production-line
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