Things got saucy on BBC’s Great Expectations as what viewers thought would be some cosy Sunday night viewing featured graphic scenes of spanking.
Yep, the Charles Dickens adaptation gave viewers a shock as they were greeted with a n**ed.n**ed Mr Pumblechook, bent over the bed while housewife Mrs Gargery smacked him.
Played by Hayley Squires, Mrs Gargery beckoned: ‘Come upstairs now.’
‘Are you ready?’, she asked, getting out her whip.
‘You know what’s coming don’t you? Turn around.’
She proceeded to strike a bare-bottomed Matt Berry not once, but 10 times!
What’s more, last night’s episode also saw setting up a grown-up Pip, () to lose his virginity on his 18th birthday.
Understandably, viewers were startled, with one Twitter user branding Mrs Gargery a ‘dominatrix’.
‘I do not remember Pip’s sister moonlighting as a dominatrix and whipping Mr. Pumblechook in the book’, one person wrote.
‘Not exactly close to the original material… the whipping scene in particular, but an interesting and watchable take’, another tweeted.
And while many argued that sexing up the Dickens classic had ‘ruined’ a much-loved tale, others defended the changes.
‘I like the new BBC #GreatExpectations & what it adds to this great novel. There’s a much more adult backbone with sex, whipping, opium addiction. There are so many adaptations – this feels new. I also like the soundscape. So some will dislike it but you don’t have to watch!’, one viewer reasoned.
Peaky Blinders screenwriter Steven Knight previously explained that his adaptation of the novel is simply exploring what he believes the author hinted at, but couldn’t discuss so frankly, in the 19th century.
if he was ‘writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places’.
Speaking ahead of release, Knight, who previously adapted Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, said: ‘What I didn’t want to do – and I think Dickens never tried to do – was make something specifically political.
‘He was never banging the drum, he was just saying, “This is what’s going on” and people could draw their own conclusions. You couldn’t write about certain things in Dickens’ time: Certain elements of sexuality, crime, disobedience against the crown and state.’
He added to: ‘What I tried to do was imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.’
Speaking about the spanking scene specifically, Colman chimed in: ‘The first time I read Steven Knight’s script, I thought it was much darker than what I had remembered from school. Quite a few bottom-slapping moments, which I did not recall from the original Dickens! There were quite a few changes and I found it quite gripping.’
The adaptation also sees Miss Havisham as an opium addict and, elsewhere, Knight includes references to the British Empire’s connections to the slave trade.
Great Expectations’ first episode began with Pip contemplating suicide, rather than being approached by Magwitch.
Great Expectations continues Sunday on BBC One.
