Blockbuster Sunday night dramas have a habit of making headlines with male nudity. Perhaps there is something about seeing the weekend out with a bang.
The last time viewers got flustered over a pair of buttocks was for Richard Madden in Bodyguard, and, before him, Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager. The recent Poldark finale didn’t feature any topless scything, but the Daily Mail waved it off to sea with a front page paying testament to “the briny sorrow of never seeing Ross soaping up in his bath again” – with a picture of him scything topless anyway. Because, well, one for the road.
Over on ITV, Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon ruffled a few feathers by featuring three bare male bottoms streaking across a beach. “There are a lot of naked males around, and I think it’s unnecessary. Look at Poldark,” the inimitable Anne Reid, who also stars in Sanditon, told the Radio Times. “But I’m old, and it’s what people want nowadays.”
Please, nobody tell her about Naked Attraction, which has the effect of making on-screen nudity entirely unerotic – a curious choice for a show that is supposed to be about dating and romance. (As true fans know, it’s really about how to look as if one is being entirely non-judgmental, while still managing to be as judgmental as possible).
Reid laid the blame for all this man-flesh at the door of Casino Royale and Daniel Craig, which turned the tables on the archetypal Bond girl emerging sexily from the waves and made Bond do the work himself. But her Sanditon director, Davies, is famous for raising the blood pressure of period dramas, from Tipping the Velvet to other Austens, including Sense and Sensibility – and, most notoriously, Pride & Prejudice. In 1995, he had Colin Firth fans panting over Firth’s sodden emergence from a lake. I went back and watched this scene, in the name of research, and it is considerably more chaste than history has remembered it to be. His Mr Darcy essentially takes off his jacket, which is more of a practical measure against drowning than it is a sign of his rampant virility. It’s as racy, these days, as a flash of the ankle.
Despite Davies’ fine work, there may be an unfair expectation of propriety placed on period dramas. I suspect that some viewers believe stories set in the past take on an instant sheen of respectability just because they’re old, when anyone who has seen Horrible Histories knows that the past was awful, and anyone who has seen Caligula knows that it was rude. This certainly seemed to be the case for two members of the audience when I went to see The Favourite at the cinema. The couple appeared to have been expecting Cranford, and ensured that everyone else knew how horrified they were by the term “cunt-struck” by tutting incredibly loudly.
Who knows what they would have made of Netflix’s Outlaw King. The nipple has long been freed for men, but there does seem to be a lot more full-frontal, as well as full “backal”, on screen than there was, at least when it comes to male, er, parts. Chris Pine’s Scottish warrior made the internet blush when he emerged from a swim without a stitch on; Mr Darcy would not have dared.
In fact, most streaming and cable television would scoff at the Sanditon fuss. Euphoria, HBO’s excellent, uproarious teen drama, features a literal lesson in dick pics, which does not shy away from showing the topic under consideration. It also features nude men and women, cis and trans, all different body types, and, for its otherwise bleak worldview, it has a warmly open and democratic approach to many kinds of human bodies.
I wonder if Reid is right, and nudity is what we want now. It is not necessarily more male nudity, but more of an equal-opportunities approach to it in general. If we’re going to have naked bodies, then let’s see the lot. It may move towards redressing an age-old imbalance; I’ve seen enough women with no clothes on for it to be par for the course in scenes that have not in any way called for nudity, sometimes in scenes in which the female character is called simply “murder victim”.
However, watching the first episode of Game of Thrones’s final season made me realise that something had shifted. They threw in a moment of the “sexposition” for which it had been known in the early days – a scene in brothel, explaining a crucial part of the plot while naked women bounce away merrily – and it was jarring and suddenly old-fashioned. I don’t think I have become more prudish in the years since Game of Thrones began, but perhaps I have grown to expect that it is not just women who will get their kits off on screen. If more bums on beaches means fewer tits on slabs, then fine: get them all out. Or else simply stop writing scenes for men near water.
• Rebecca Nicholson is a freelance writer
