In fact, Connie is a middle-class, cosmopolitan, highly-cultured Scot — more Howard’s End Schlegel girl than proto-flapper. I therefore successfully suggested to Mercurio that the events be reversed. Rather than Connie requesting that the music be changed from classical to ragtime, she could be given the opposite request, and would make her first connection with Clifford whilst doing so. Similarly, I questioned Clifford’s being made to manifest indignation on discovering that his new bride was not a virgin, because it contradicted his character as someone to whom neither sex nor virginity were of much importance. Lawrence too cared little for virginity, but for the crucially different reason that he saw someone’s sexual history as irrelevant to their sexual present.

Just as “the mob” has over the decades read Lady Chatterley’s Lover looking for the “dirty bits”, so it has watched its various adaptations. This is a risk which any adaptor faces. But there are others. It is likely that Lawrence would have disapproved of audiences watching naked actors, and would have classified their acceptance of money in order to appear naked as literal and metaphorical prostitution. He may also have classified the interaction between them and an absent film audience as an ersatz connection bearing a similar relationship to real physical encounter as First World War warfare did to sincere hand-to-hand combat. Of course, he presented naked bodies abundantly to the eye in his paintings (as exhibited, then imprisoned, in the year following Lady Chatterley’s Lover), but these remain firmly within the artistic sphere of the imitative, as the nudity of an actor cannot.

On set last October my sense of this was reinforced when seeing how abruptly the actors were moved between non-contiguous scenes. They were indeed being paid to — all of a sudden, and acording to a shooting schedule of military-style discipline — snog a near-stranger; this must perforce be done with more sang-froid than mind-body connection. Economic imperatives demanded that the lead actors be more visually attractive than in the novel, and this is of course a problem faced by all adaptations of novels of which the protagonists are not spectacular beauties. As is the way with “costume” dramas, the costumes assumed a large visual importance, recalling (if not justifying) Lawrence’s point in his essay “Introduction to these Paintings” about “Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough”: “The coat is really more important than the man. It is amazing how important clothes suddenly become, how they cover the subject.”

But Lawrence concedes the intrinsic difficulties of the visual medium. “It is easy in literature . . . You can get some of the lusciousness of Hetty Sorrell’s ‘sin’, and you can enjoy condemning her to penal servitude for life. You can thrill to Mr Rochester’s passion, and you can enjoy having his eyes burnt out . . . But in paint it is more difficult. You couldn’t paint Hetty Sorrell’s sin or Mr Rochester’s passion without being really shocking.” Here he implicitly admits why it is harder for a film adaptation to achieve the aims of Lady Chatterley’s Lover than the novel itself.