Sometimes sisters can do it for themselves

'Tipping the Velvet' is a confident tale of lesbian culture. It is depressing to see it as a romp for the boys

In the second episode of the new television series Tipping the Velvet, the first chunk of which was screened last night, the camera executes a neat trick. As our heroine, Nancy, takes to earning her living by passing herself off as a young man and giving relief to elderly homosexuals on the streets of London, we see her opening the trousers of her first client. She takes a look inside, and the camera looks back. The camera has taken on a penis's eye view.

This could serve as a metaphor for the series, which has already been defined as a bloke's take on a lesbian romance. As the scriptwriter Andrew Davies said proudly at a press conference: "Men are going to love it." No doubt he felt that such a judgement would serve as a great advertisement for the series, but it's likely that some viewers will feel cheated by this way of summing up the drama in question. This is, after all, the most daring television drama about lesbianism ever seen; a groundbreaking moment in television history, no less.

But this series is adapted by a man, directed by a man, and is now being picked up by populist newspapers as a cross between page three and What the butler saw. It didn't have to be quite like this. After all, the novel on which the series is based, Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet, is a striking re-imagining of lesbian culture of the 19th century. It isn't Waters's best book, but it is still a heartfelt exploration of what a young lesbian woman would have had to live through in Victorian London in order to stay true to her desires. Waters plays around with historical sources in order to try to create a sense of how some women might have forged emotional, physical and social bonds that would have given them real independence from mainstream society.

Given that Tipping the Velvet began as such a confident tale of lesbian culture, it's rather depressing to hear its adaptor selling the series as a romp for the boys. However, Andrew Davies was clearly less interested in the emotional and social milieu that Sarah Waters builds up than in the purely physical elements of the story. He told one interviewer just what it was that drew him to this book: "There was one scene in which Nan is dressed in a little red guardsman's jacket and boots, wearing nothing else but a dildo, while standing in a room lined with mirrors, and I thought that I'd really like to see that on TV."

Of course Davies has been known for a while as a writer who likes to add sexual tension to his dramas, but he has usually done so within a subtle context. In adaptations from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, he has proved himself over and over again to be capable of writing fine dramatisations of complicated novels. But here he has abandoned his ability to use a script in order to convey nuances of emotion, in favour of a winking, giggling, comic-book style of narrative.

It isn't that he has put in any more sex than there is in the book – Sarah Waters certainly loves bawdy scenes – but that there is so little here besides the sex; so that, in the second episode, the series gradually becomes little more than a procession of racy tableaux.

Sarah Waters built up the sexual tension in her novel around two romances that are as much emotional as fleshly, and if she had adapted her own material for the screen, you could imagine being moved by some of the more poignant moments in those relationships. For Andrew Davies, the sexual tension centres around nothing so much as the giant strap-on dildo that takes a central role, together with gold paint and soldier costumes. "Absolutely filthy," is what he calls the series. Absolutely hilarious, is what many viewers might murmur.

But naturally the press has been quick to applaud the idea of a lesbian drama for the boys. The Sun called Tipping the Velvet "sizzling", "raunchy" and "one of the most provocative programmes ever screened"; the newspaper characterised it as a show in which Nan "romps her way through London with various busty girls". The woman who plays Nan, Rachael Stirling, has been the only person involved in the production to criticise the tabloids' attitudes. She has called them "homophobic", gathering around the prospect of watching lesbian sex like "piranhas around a rotting corpse".

I'm not sure that voyeurism quite counts as a phobia, but I do think that it is telling that lesbian sex is still seen more as an added fillip to heterosexual desire than as a passion in its own right. This attitude is confined to lesbian sex – male homosexuals do not litter the pages of the News of the World and The Sun as "sizzling" and "provocative" fodder for their heterosexual readers. Some women might be rather happy if they were; after all, the most enthusiastic fans of Queer as Folk, the Channel 4 drama set in Manchester's gay community, that I knew were in fact straight women who liked watching the pretty young men in one another's arms. But while it is generally assumed that lesbians are doing it for the boys, gay men are usually assumed to be doing it for one another.

There was a brief moment in the Seventies and Eighties when lesbian desire was seen as something that had a revolutionary force to it, something that might encourage women actually to end up by turning their backs on men. However, now it tends to be seen as a saucy adjunct to whatever the women in question get up to with men. That means that girl-on-girl moments are now welcomed into mainstream comedies – Jennifer Aniston got such a kiss in the last series of Friends, and Calista Flockhart was given a similar scene in Ally McBeal a couple of years ago.

However, neither moment was allowed to throw either woman off her straight and narrow course of looking for Mr Right. Even in a series such as Sex and the City, which eventually managed to work lesbian sex into its varied menu of sexual delights, it took just one episode for Samantha to realise that baths by candlelight with her female lover were no substitute for energetic sex with the array of men she usually welcomed to her apartment.

That inability to imagine lesbian love as any kind of substitute for the real thing was apparent even in the much-touted American film comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein, which was released earlier this year. To make it acceptable to the mainstream audience, the heroine, Jessica Stein, was always more interested in her female lover's lipsticks than in her body, and ended up, after all her Sapphic hors d'oeuvres, waiting for a more satisfying meal to come along as soon as possible.

Still, let's look on the bright side. Even if this adaptation of Tipping the Velvet doesn't break up the hardest ground, it may be the first sign of something starting to shift in mainstream culture. After all, a few years ago you certainly would not have expected to turn on the television at 9pm and find actresses eating out oyster shells and one another with quite such enthusiasm. There's a rich vein of lesbian literature that could now be tapped for the small screen very easily. And after a few more adaptations of such tales, even the tabloid press might get used to the idea that sometimes sisters can do it for themselves.

n.walter@btinternet.com