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Of course, it isn't only in the “older world” of the 19th century that homosexuality was expected to remain hidden. Gerald Fedden, the head of the family, is a Conservative member of Parliament. Already susceptible to scandal, his problems increase when a tabloid reveals that he has had a gay man conducting an affair in his house.

Stevens says, “The idea that actually an MP could be damned for having a gay lodger … you know, how accurate that was I can't remember, but it certainly seems to have a ring of truth to a lot of people, this sort of scandal, that just associating with a homosexual in 1987 was ruinous to your political career.”

He reflects on the impact of the series in the current day: “I think The Line of Beauty opened a lot of people's eyes to a world that they weren't really aware of, and a world that was skirted around quite a lot in the '80s. The gay community was considered ‘a problem' in the '80s, and the development of understanding in my lifetime has been huge. It was something I was very proud to represent. Not being gay myself, but being very much for civil liberties, and the societal development that we can now talk about these things.”

Stevens laughs. “And actually, you have to turn to my parents' generation, and say to them ‘Oh, grow up,'” he says. “There were all these people of my parents' generation saying, ‘Well, you know, I found it quite difficult to watch certain bits of the series, and I had to turn off at certain points.' And it's like, ‘Well, just watch it.'” He laughs again. “Or don't watch it. But it's about time that those sort of dramas were on the BBC, and that it wasn't really an issue.”

Stevens is adamant that the prospect of shocking certain audience members didn't faze him. “I've always relished that kind of controversy, really. In a way, as a job it embodied all the sorts of things that I'd like to achieve in my career. Which is: high-profile, good-quality drama with interesting characters, but at the same time not treading that safer line.

“And there are safe jobs — I've just done [Noel Coward's play] Hay Fever with Judi Dench in the West End, which is about as safe as you can get. And that was brilliant in a totally different way. But The Line of Beauty — I knew we were on to a good thing. Saul Dibb's a fantastic director, and it was a brilliant adaptation of a wonderful book. And yet I knew that readers of [conservative British newspaper] The Daily Mail weren't going to like it — and that delighted me even more, I think.” He laughs at the idea.

A lot of the controversy over the book The Line of Beauty centered on different opinions of its leading character. Viewed as simply naïve by some, to others he was cold, opportunistic, hedonistic and hard to empathize with. “Some people really didn't like Nick, and some people really sympathized with him,” Stevens says. “So that was interesting one. And actually, when it came to it, I just sort of had to make some choices. It treads an interesting line between sympathy and … unsympathy.”

He decided to humanize the character and make him warmer. “When I read the book, I certainly had more sympathy for Nick than some of the reactions I'd heard. Also, he's so crucial to that series and you see so much of him, that if I'd played him as unlikable, it would have been quite unwatchable — and quite unplayable. And so I think I had to like him more than some. That's not to say he's flawless.”

Stevens continues: “But I did sympathize with Nick's condition of just wanting to be completely absorbed and consumed by this fantasy world that he's encountered. A world that initially he feels embodies all of his aesthetic ideals It's beautiful, the way the story is constructed, in that this world slowly crumbles, and is left ringing quite hollow. And a lot of people's memories of the '80s were of quite a hollow, superficial decade. I don't think that's necessarily true, but it's certainly an interesting facet of the decade, that money and power had all sorts of strange effects on the way people interacted and behaved.”

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