But if what Lawrence called “word-prudery” was in his own time directed at any use of these terms, it has now morphed into a fatigue at those aggressive and contemptuous uses of the words, which Lawrence himself would have shared (“even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously”). Mercurio’s sparingness with taboo words may have in part been acquiescence with the BBC’s decency guidelines (Mercurio commented to me: “Currently fuck is strongly discouraged and cunt is unacceptable. They count number of uses and proximity to programme start. Every use of fuck would have to be approved at Controller level”; and the Controller might of course judge with his “mob” self). But if so, it was acquiescence with a rule which in the balance of cases today Lawrence would have thought well applied.

It is equally clear that Lawrence would have condemned a high proportion of the books and films which his novel’s unbanning (and its establishment of precedent for application of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act) helped to bring into the world. Lady Chatterley’s Lover not only didn’t shrink the volume of pornography in the world, it encouraged a deluge of it, and remains associated with it in the popular consciousness. Mercurio’s adaptation recently occasioned a newspaper article on “racy period lingerie”; “A Propos” explicitly deplores modern men’s greater concentration on female underwear than on sex itself. If Mercurio was right that the battle to represent sex has been won, his decision not to reprise that victory was tactful in the light of the novel’s flagrant unintended consequences.

Yet Lawrence’s contempt for the modern bohemian manner of taking sex “lightly” also made him aware that bohemians in his own time would condemn the novel: “They despise a book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is much too simple and ordinary for them. The naughty words they care nothing about, and the attitude to love they find old-fashioned. Why make a fuss about it? Take it like a cocktail.” This too is echoed in the present. Holliday Grainger (who plays Connie) was recently quoted saying of the novel that she “doesn’t see what all the fuss is about”, and Richard Madden (Mellors) has said, “Come on guys, we’ve got Google . . . There’s nothing that’s going to shock us that we’re going to do in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is there?” Plus ça change — but also true, and preferable to the attempt to read the novel pornographically.

Still, the novel’s contempt for bohemianism led me to question a moment in an early draft of the script in which Connie — at the ball at which she meets Clifford — asks the musicians to switch from their sedate classical music to ragtime. This echoed not only a similar moment in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, but the scene in Ken Russell’s 1969 Women in Love in which Birkin mischievously asks a pianist accompanying Hermione’s Ballet Russe to switch to ragtime. This latter detail (like many in the film) was more Russell than Lawrence, and in the context of Lady Chatterley’s Lover it was even more unfortunate, since jazz is throughout the novel associated with shallowness. Tommy Dukes (the closest thing to a Lawrencian in Clifford’s Cambridge crowd) characterises modern love as “Fellows with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks”. Connie finds Venice as “almost enjoyment”, “all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!”