My highlight: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

The potty-mouthed gamekeeper is back. Oliver Mellors, he of the corduroy breeches, is striding towards us in the shape of Richard Madden (Robb Stark in Game of Thrones) in the BBC’s new version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Except that he’s cleaned up his act. Madden’s Mellors is positively bashful when it comes to four-letter words. It’s a decorous “bottom” instead of “arse”, and there’s just one “cock”, right at the end, at which point Lady C is so embarrassed she doesn’t know where to look.

Director Jed Mercurio, who also wrote the adaptation, maintains that there’s no justification these days for bad language. The words that got the book banned for 30 years have lost their original purpose, which was to de-smut sex. This seems sensible.

Less happy, perhaps, is Mercurio’s belief that other parts of Lawrence’s message are unrecoverable. In the novel Mellors has served in the army as an officer and a (temporary) gentleman, which makes his subsequent gamekeeping, and all that “theeing” and “thouing”, a bit annoying to Connie Chatterley, who wonders why he keeps putting on that silly voice.

Likewise, Ivy Bolton, the 47-year-old district nurse who tends to Sir Clifford and fancies herself a cut above, is demoted to being a village girl (albeit a pretty one). Consequently, the class politics are binary, toffs and plebs, with very little of Lawrence’s original point that the postwar world is throwing up all kinds of in-betweeners.

In other ways, though, the new version is wonderfully subtle. In past screen incarnations Sir Clifford, the baronet with a wheelchair, has been rendered so pompous or feeble that Lady C’s decision to choose Mellors is a no-brainer. But by casting handsome James Norton (late of Grantchester) and emphasising Sir Clifford’s insistence that marriage is about daily intimacies and shared goals rather than a bit of rumpy pumpy with the hired help, moral complexity is restored. In fact, you begin to wonder whether Lady C, far from being an adorable free spirit, isn’t actually a bit of a bitch.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover will be shown on BBC1 on 6 September.