Playing rough

While we are used to men taking lovers from below the salt - after all, kings and nobles, great statesmen and landowners have been at it since time immemorial - it remains a cause for controversy when a woman selects a partner from outwith her high-flying natural milieu.

This is the stuff of bodice-ripping chicklit andevenhighbrowfiction.Lady Chatterley's Lover would probably have been published 30 years earlier had it not been for the fact that the shenanigans it featured took place between a sweaty gamekeeper and a fragrant member of the English aristocracy.

Lady Chatterley's power to engage is as strong now as it was when the novel (written in 1928) was finally allowed to go to print in 1960, and it is set for a resurgence with the imminent release of a new French adaptation, Lady Chatterley Et L'homme Des Bois. Directed by Pascale Ferran, it swept the boards at the 2007 Cesar film awards in Paris, winning Best Film and four other top prizes, and is tipped to give good box office when it opens in the UK this summer.

Author DH Lawrence is said to have drawn the inspiration for his enduringly scandalous novel from an affair between hisfriend,libertariansocialiteLady Ottoline Morrell, and a young stonemason called Tiger. He spotted that there is a frisson of the forbidden about such pairings that lends them a particular erotic charge. Women, especially rich and powerful ones, are not meant to enjoy mucking around with bits of rough. When they do, the gut reaction is a turbulent mixture of outrage and lip-smacking curiosity.

That knee-jerk response is probably borne of ancient efforts to protect family fortunes and maintain pure-bred lineages. In reluctant recognition of the unfavourable practice, the mediaeval concept of the morganatic marriage was devised. This ensured that the union of people of unequal social rank, while acknowledged as lawful, was suitably circumscribed by proscribing inheritance to the lower-status spouse and to any offspring they may have.

In subtly different forms, these so-called left-handed marriages still take place today: when Camilla's husband becomes king, she will not be allowed to assume the sobriquet queen, but will be known as HRH the Princess Consort instead. The subtext is clearly "not quite our sort".

A similar quasi-union was suggested in 1936 by Edward VIII when he was trying to get permission to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson. When the morganatic compromise was knocked back, the king stepped down.

There is plenty of precedent for cross-class couplings in the royal family - even prissy Queen Victoria dabbled, it is rumoured, with Highland ghillie John Brown - but they historically turned a blind eye to declassé partnerships so long as they remained firmly under wraps. However in the age of the tabloid, that's harder to pull off. Fergie's encounter with her toe-sucking financial adviser finally put paid to the duchess's loftier ambitions. And when Princess Diana allegedly got it together with her personal bodyguard, policeman Barry Mannakee, there was hell to pay at the palace.

The eroticisation of the working class is a subject exploredbyAmerican writer Stephen Donaldson. He says: "The psychological roots of the aristocracy's attraction to the working classhavenotbeensystematically examined, but are undoubtedly related to a sense that the upper class (in particular its intellectuals) has lost some of its masculine vitality,hasbecomeeffete',refined, sophisticated, removed from the exercise of physical power, while the young males of the lower class are more robust, earthy, grounded, more in touch with their sexuality, more physically aggressive. In short, more macho."

That explains Will Carling, then. Not to mention a host of other horny-handed hunks that flit across our airwaves: right now Lilian Archer, snooty scion of the fictional family behind the enduring Radio 4 soap about farming folk, is engaged in a hot flirtation with local milkman Mike Tucker. She has asked Mike, an amateur ballroom dancer, to give her some lessons in fancy footwork and wants him to keep their terpsichoreal trysts a secret. At first reluctant, Mike finally succumbs and Lilian takes her leave of him with the saucy pay-off: "Until tomorrow, Professor Higgins."

Another long-running storyline, this time in the US series Desperate Housewives, featured romantic rivalry between posh Englishman Ian Hainsworth (improbably played by Scottish actor Dougray Scott) and humble plumber Mike Delfino: needless to say, the handyman won out. And it was an ongoinggaginthesitcomAbsolutely Fabulous that top-totty Patsy had a soft-spot for tradesmen - the rougher, the better.

The notion of a dalliance between a working-class man and a woman of higher birth taps straight into the female sexual psyche. It is about the frisson of the forbidden. As Nancy Friday puts it in My Secret Garden, her ground-breaking anthology of women's sexual fantasies: "Some people rob banks for the sheer thrill of getting away with it. Or, to put it another way, for the excitement of maybe being caught. In every suspense thriller the clock ticks ominously it is only a matter of time. This idea of time running out on the guilty act heightens everything. It's especially so when the guilty act is sex."

For some couples the social differential seems to serve as a sort of role-play scenario. When Madonna married self-styled Cockney geezer Guy Ritchie, one might have thought the class divide had finally crumbled. He called her his missus and took her down the pub, artfully disguising the fact that he is in fact the highly privileged and privately educated stepson of a baronet. Ritchie is not the only upper-crust bloke to have worked out that roughing it up a bit can pay off with the ladies: even Tony Blair began dropping his consonants and affecting an estuary accent when he started wooing the female vote.

There is no doubt that cheeky-chappy charm is a booster-rocket in the pulling stakes.Pairthatwithacommanding physique and a healthy disregard for the established niceties, and you are on to a sure-fire winner. Think Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Low-life lovers rock.

Sure, there must be plenty of fun to be had for both parties in the early stages of a naughtytrans-classliaison,butwhat happens when the bad-boy buzz wears off? Initial amusement about social ineptitude can soon turn into cringing embarrassment when he persists in saying "toilet" and farting in company, and then there is all the external pressure brought to bear when word gets out. One side of the family is likely to be for it, and the other decidedly against.

It may be insulting to assume that people from opposite ends of the social spectrum cannot find enough common ground to sustainanintellectuallyrewarding relationship, but it is a fact that few such partnerships seem to survive the difficult transitionfromrawlusttolong-term commitment.

How Paul Sculfor is coping with his new role as downmarket arm candy to Hollywood star Aniston is not yet known, but the chances are he is happy to play along. While it is true that he did work as a brickie once, when he was 16, Sculfor is now an acclaimed $1500-a-day model. He memorably appeared in a lavish ad that featured three scantily-clad mermaids trying to remove his Levi's, and is a former squeeze of George Clooney's ex Lisa Snowdon and famous-for-being-famous socialite Lady Victoria Hervey. Perhaps not such a no-mark after all.

Cynics will observe that news of the Aniston-Sculfor affair broke on the very day that her ex-husband Brad Pitt was in LA with his new love, luscious-lipped actress Angelina Jolie, launching the movie Ocean's 13. Perhaps it was a desperate attempt by a spurned lover to push her former spouse off the front pages. In the end, though, it was Pitt and Jolie who hogged the headlines and Aniston and her Brad-lookalike new partner were relegated to the inside pages. Ifitwasapublicitystunt,Anistonis condemned to extricating herself with her dignity intact and the former amateur boxer Sculfor must make the most of his moment in the celebrity spotlight. So far, though, neither has said a word.

Back home in Essex, outside what the tabloids describe as the Sculfor family's "modest bungalow", there is a decidedly non-U sign saying: "A life without friends is agardenwithoutflowers."Makethat "Friends" and they might well have a point.

Lady Chatterley Et L'homme Des Bois is released August 24