Desperate Romantics

The series is based on Franny Moyle's factual book 'Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites'; Moyle, a former BBC arts commissioning editor, approached writer Peter Bowker with the book believing it could form the basis of a TV drama.

Writer Peter Bowker admitted to having a 'horror of dramatised art biography' but felt Moyle's book offered a fresh angle by viewing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's art through the filter of their tangled love lives.

Moyle rejected the show's promotional tagline 'Entourage with easels,' saying she had pitched it as a big emotional saga akin to The Forsyte Saga, though she conceded the comparison was a useful shorthand for the drama.

The BBC also billed the series as 'marrying the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the values of Desperate Housewives.'

Desperate Romantics was not the first TV dramatisation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's lives: Ken Russell directed 'Dante's Inferno' in 1967, and a six-part serial called 'The Love School' aired in 1975; the new series was greatly influenced by this earlier production.

The character Fred Walters, who serves as narrator and audience surrogate, is a composite based on three real figures: Frederic George Stephens, William Michael Rossetti, and Walter Deverell.

For pacing reasons, the adaptation compresses events that unfolded over roughly 12 years in Moyle's book into a story that feels like it takes place over just a couple of years.

The premiere episode drew 2.61 million viewers on BBC Two but received decidedly mixed reviews, with critics like Caitlin Moran of The Times mocking it as 'so bone-deep cheesy that it appears to have been written with Primula, on Kraft Cheese Slices, and shot on location in Cheddar.'