Remembering ‘Tipping The Velvet,’ The “Joyous” Lesbian Romance That Changed Television

Tipping the Velvet opens on the fleshy inside of an oyster. It’s only a quick shot, but if you saw the series back when it aired on BBC Two or on BBC America in 2002, you’re not likely to forget its intro or anything that came after. It was racy and raucous, campy and puckish — and a joyous celebration of lesbianism that shocked some and titillated others.

The deeply sensual story is about an impressionable young “oyster girl” named Nancy “Nan” Astley (Rachael Stirling) who falls in love with a beguiling male impersonator, Kitty Butler (Keeley Hawes). The two create an act together and fall in love, but soon it ends in heartache. Nan is left abandoned in London and must find her way through the darkest corners of the Edwardian underworld to a real, satisfying romance with a sweet reformer named Florence (Jodhi May). For the first time in a long time, Tipping the Velvet will be accessible to American audiences. The series is finally available to stream on BritBox this month.

Though the series might not seem all that scandalous to today’s sophisticated viewer, in 2002, things were different. Explicit depictions of gay sex were confined to the unrated stomping grounds of HBO and Showtime. While shows like Queer as Folk and OZ were indeed breaking ground in LGBTQ storytelling, portrayals of gay and lesbian romances on mainstream TV were sanitized, and confined to cautionary tales or family friendly primetime programming. Tipping the Velvet, a blithe coming-of-age lesbian drama that proudly showed off both soul-crushing heartache and “strap on” sex toys with equal candor broke ground simply by existing. The fact that it was commissioned to run BBC Two, an edgy — but still sort of staid — major broadcast channel in the UK was all the more shocking.

Tipping the Velvet‘s author Sarah Waters remembered the impact miniseries had over 15 years ago. “It kind of hit a moment when things in British culture and society were changing. Attitudes were changing,” she recalled. “It was a real wave of change, in the last 15 years or so… Tipping the Velvet was just at the start of that.”

Waters told us that Tipping the Velvet had been on her mind a lot lately. This month marks the book’s 20th anniversary, and the debut novel was a surprise success for the academic, who is now considered one of the big British novelists of the last few decades. While American audiences might be more familiar with adaptations of Waters’ second novel, Fingersmith — the BBC produced a fairly faithful miniseries adaptation of the book in 2005 and Korean director Park Chan-wook based his creepy critical smash The Handmaiden on the novel  — she told us that Tipping the Velvet holds a special place in her heart. “I’ve had several books adapted now for the screen and stage, but Tipping the Velvet was the first time it had happened for me so it was fantastically exciting.”

Waters said that the experience only got more “fantastic” — “you know, a thing of fantasy to me” — when the show’s production company, Sally Head Productions, tapped famed writer Andrew Davies to adapt the book for the screen. Davies had written the original House of Cards and the uber-popular adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth as a dishy Mr. Darcy. Davies has recently acknowledged that he probably single-handedly helped usher in a saucier era for the BBC and Waters says Davies was attracted to the “kind of upbeat sex” in her novel. “He clearly wanted to do what I had wanted to do, which was to tell a slightly new story about the Victorians. To kind of overturn some of our stereotypes about the Victorians; about them being kind of staid and sexless and very heterosexual,” said Waters.

Director Geoffrey Sax told us that he was drawn to the project because of a character. “Nan was a flawed heroine,” Sax said, before comparing her to Gone With the Wind‘s Scarlett O’Hara. “Her moral compass was questionable at times, [but] you’re still really rooting for her.”

When Sax got the script, he was working on a modern-day retelling of Othello that featured actors Keeley Hawes and Rachael Stirling. “I immediately thought of them both and, in fact, I did have to put up quite the fight to get Rachael [Stirling],” he said. Neither Hawes nor Stirling are gay in real life, and we asked Sax if that was ever brought up as a point of contention. “That, at the time, was not really a concern. It’s the same with everything. You try to cast the people who are best in the roles. I don’t know if any of the actors were gay or straight, and I didn’t ask. We just went with the finest people for the roles. That was that, really. Now, I supposed you’d have to view it differently, I don’t know. At the time, it seemed to be okay.”

Tipping The Velvet is chock full of future stars. Nina Gold — the casting director who would go on to discover the stars of Game of Thrones and Star Wars: The Force Awakens — was responsible for bringing people like Anna Chancellor and Jodhi May to the project, as well as hiring then “unknowns” Benedict Cumberbatch, Sally Hawkins, and Hugh Bonneville.

“Do you know, you can always spot them,” Sax said. “I remember working with people like Paul Bettany and David Morrissey early on in their careers, and you just know, and I knew with Benedict Cumberbatch. I just felt that he had an extraordinary quality to him. It was a very small part, but given that it was so small, he has so much dignity playing it. And certainly, Sally [Hawkins], who was already getting a little bit of a name for herself.”

She didn’t go on to have a massive film career, but author Sarah Waters also had a bit part in the series. “I have a part as an extra,” she said. “I pop up in the opening credits in the first episode in a bonnet.”

Waters also praised the adaptation for the way it was able to bring an oft-forgotten subculture of the 19th century to vibrant life. “I loved seeing the depiction of male impersonators because that had been a starting point for me. There had been these fantastically exciting, very, very mainstream male impersonators in Victorian and Edwardian theater here. People like Vesta Tilly and Hetty King. You look at pictures of them now and they look gay; they look queer, anyway. They look like drag kings,” Waters said. “They weren’t seen like this at the time, but they must have had a queer appeal for some of their viewers. So it was lovely to see that there were some scenes in the first episode of the series where Kitty and Nancy are on stage together.”

Which is all well and good, but it’s hard to talk about Tipping the Velvet without talking about sex. The series is not subtle about sexuality, and that has excited and rankled viewers in equal measure.  In 2003, British publication The Telegraph described the cultural reaction thus: “Feminist writers decried its ‘bloke’s-eye take on lesbianism’ although some men complained that it was not as explicit as the corporation had promised.” Waters, who literally titled her book Tipping The Velvet, an old slang expression for cunnilingus, had no illusions about the show’s more prurient appeal.

“I think what had drawn the production company, and Andrew [Davies], and the BBC to it that it was — they were all kind of largely straight — but even to them, they were able to enjoy the relaxed, upbeat way lesbian life and lesbian sex [were depicted],” Waters said before acknowledging a deeper truth about the story’s pull. “And for the lesbian readers of the book and the lesbian viewers of the program, that was even more exciting. Because we do see lesbian and gay life portrayed on screen, now more than ever, in pretty good ways, but that’s only been a relatively recent thing.”

“We do see depictions of lesbian sex…but I think it’s rarer to see sustained depictions of lesbian romance in the mainstream.”

“I’ve watched the series several times over the years and when it was first shown on television here, it got a lot of attention because there’s a rather lot of sex in it. And there’s a dildo, that sort of thing,” she continued. “Whenever I watch it now, I’m struck by how romantic it is. It’s terribly romantic by the time you get to the final episode. I think that weirdly, that’s something we see less. We do see depictions of lesbian sex. Sometimes in a rather porn-ified kind of way, but it’s rarer to see sustained depictions of lesbian romance in the mainstream. So I’m always grateful that the series has that side to it as well.”

“It’s weird to see it referred to as a lesbian classic,” Waters said. “Ideas about gender and sexuality are always in a state of evolution. Looking at it now, for me, it very much belongs to 1990s lesbian life here. There seemed to be a new kind of freedom. But yeah, things have moved on.”

Since Tipping the Velvet, we’ve seen “groundbreaking” shows like The L-Word, Transparent, Orange Is The New Black, and The Fosters find popularity on TV. As those shows have pushed the conversation forward, they’ve taken pains to include more perspectives to LGBTQ storytelling. But because of its setting, Tipping the Velvet is filled with predominantly white women, and because of the time it was made, it plays with drag culture without examining it closely. So what should viewers hope to take away from Tipping the Velvet in 2018?

“I hope that they get out of it all the kind of fun and excitement that went into creating it,” Waters noted. “It’s kind of a joyous show, and I hope that viewers will feel that joy.”

“It was ahead of its time,” Sax adds, “and maybe now time has caught up with it.”

 

Stream Tipping the Velvet on BritBox