It's sexier than 'Poldark' and more grounded than 'Game of Thrones'. Lucy Davies on the joys of 'Outlander'

Midway through season one of Outlander, the sword and sex-charged drama set in 18th-century Scotland, there’s a spanking scene in which a newly married husband – Jamie – takes a leather belt to the bare derriere of his wife, Claire, because she disobeyed an order and put his and other lives in jeopardy. She retaliates by kicking her husband in the jaw and calling him a sadist.

It’s one of three scenes producer Ron D Moore considered key, when adapting the series for television. That the others were a wedding night and a male rape, gives you some idea of the realms the show dares to plumb. “Figuring out far to go; not wanting to flinch or be gratuitous, required delicate handling,” says Moore.

Outlander is based on a sequence of novels begun in 1991 by the American author Diana Gabaldon. Eight have been published so far, selling upwards of 26 million copies; she’s currently working on her ninth. The story begins in 1945, when Claire, a spirited battlefield nurse, is holidaying with her husband Frank in Inverness, trying to rekindle their marriage following years apart during the war. Following some spooky Celtic goings-on, she involuntarily falls through time (bear with me here) to 1743, and a Scotland rippling with the stirrings of Jacobite rebellion. This is where the meat of the show really happens, and the time-travel falls mercifully by the wayside.