Brace yourselves. As if, in the eyes of our dear Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, the BBC wasn’t profligate enough an institution already, in the next few weeks comes another yet another piece of ammunition for him: BBC2’s high-profile acquisition Versailles, a raunchy period drama about the reign of Louis XIV.

In this Franco-Canadian blockbuster bonkbuster’s first episode alone, we can apparently look forward to gay sex, a cross-dressing prince and – most shocking of all for those respectable gentlemen who may not even have known it existed – cunnilingus!

Earlier this year, there was a national freakout over a briefly glimpsed penis

Duly it is set to arrive on the wave of a minor furore, whipped up with the help of the Daily Mail and Whittingdale’s colleague, Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who fumed in March that “there are channels where if you wish to view this sort of material, you would have to pay for it”.

What you couldn’t pay for is the astounding amount of coverage that the unclothed human body on screen still excites. Earlier this year, there was a national freakout over a briefly glimpsed penis in War and Peace, for heaven’s sake. Funny to think that where violence is part of the furniture in our crime drama-saturated schedules, sex and nakedness still create headlines.

Call me an old perv, but I can’t help thinking that we should have more of both on our screens – and not just because then they wouldn’t.

Take the celebratedly immodest Game of Thrones. It could do with a more gender equal approach to nudity, a more diverse approach to body shapes, and certainly has a questionable relationship with sexual violence.

But, saying all that, the basic conceit of its sexual explicitness – matching the fantasy genre to the coarse, earthy reality of being human – seems to me a good one. And other genres that can tend towards the ethereal, from period dramas to sci-fi, can benefit from similar “sexing up”: or is that “sexing down”?

Sex scenes on TV can be more than titillating: they can be normalising

And sex scenes on TV can be more than titillating: they can be normalising. Back in 1999, Russell T Davies’ Queer as Folk caused a stir for its graphic gay sex scenes. But to me, as a closeted 16 year-old, it was rather more than a hubbub: it was the first time I could imagine that crucial sex part of my sexuality as a viable, non-shameful option.

(Incidentally and depressingly, Davies was causing a stir again in the papers last week for the mere addition of a lesbian kiss in his upcoming BBC take on A Midsummer’s Night Dream). And, by the same token, how great would it be if we saw more sex scenes involving older people?

In fact, sex can be a great and valuable subject for a series full stop, as we know from the early, funny days of Sex and the City; it’s also a core preoccupation of the best new American drama of recent times, Amazon’s Transparent. Indeed, that show’s creator Jill Soloway has now been commissioned by the streaming service to continue her exploration of the erotic with “highbrow sex comedy”, I Love Dick.

People like the right honourable Mr Bridgen often like to equate explicit sex on TV with pornography. But in fact it achieves the very opposite. It allows sex its proper context within the world, rather than rather than reducing it to mere mechanics.