My favourite guilty pleasure at the moment has to be the BBC's attempt at reducing high art to the lowest common denominator with Desperate Romantics. Despite the fact that most people now view the Pre-Raphaelites as a big bunch of wets with a fondness for foliage and a giant thing for gingers, at the time, they were as scandalous as the YBAs, with saucy sex lives to match.

But of course today's audiences couldn't possibly be expected to find blokes opaquely challenging the morals of the day via the medium of lilies, irises and pansies at all intriguing. I suspect that the book this was based on was being read by a producer who was watching the DVD of David Tennant's Casanova at the same time. The result is a costume drama for the Facebook generation, involving good looking, kind of familiar actors, a lot of running around, rapid editing and bonkers music.

The soundtrack is the sort of hectic, hurdy-gurdy, twiddly, tinkly circus music that makes it feel as though the whole programme is winking at you like an epileptic with a tic for an hour. Rossetti seems to have unearthed Sylvester McCoy's entirely unlamented costume from his stint as Doctor Who in the 80s. Poor Aidan Turner (who's very good, and totally fanciable in Being Human), appears to have been told to play Dante Gabriel as if he were Robbie Williams in his Take That days: superficially good looking and charming, but increasingly riven with jealousy as he realises that his talent is a very mediocre one indeed when viewed along the same bit of wall as Millais' (the Pre-Raphs' equivalent of Gary Barlow). In short, he's a desperately irritating twat, who spends most of his time hanging out in suspiciously clean and smoke-free taverns, blagging booze off his hapless mate.

Naturally, Lizzie Siddal proves that the world of modelling hasn't changed much since the 1850s by promptly falling for him. Lizzie has been cast as the original supermodel, cannily refusing to get out of bed and back into a bath for less than £30. The girls' part in Desperate Romantics is largely to take part in top notch reality show The Victorians' Next Top Model. They valiantly hold chronically uncomfortable poses, are asked to convey a variety of conflicting emotions that would give ANTM's Mr Jay a run for his money, solely via the medium of their hair and an upturned gaze and prove that in order to create great art and lasting fame as a model you have to really suffer. I suspect Lizzie was less than thrilled to discover that the gig which was billed as 'frolicking around in a hot tub' actually translated into, 'pretending to drown in a bath heated by guttering candles for 10 days'.

She manages to go one better than Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista by nearly dying of pneumonia. This at least means that the RA snobs can stop thinking of her as one up from a prostitute for five minutes, while they ask her what she thinks of the resulting Ophelia. No such luck for Holman Hunt's model Annie Miller, who clearly is a whore because she's got really violently curly hair. Oh, and she's doing Holman Hunt and you'd have to be paid to do that. Even the BBC have painted him as a delusional, slack-jawed twonk.

I keep expecting Ruskin to end each episode faced with a brace of hopeful girls as he declares, 'I only have one portrait in my hands...'

The titian stunners will presumably soon have competition in the shape of gorgeous pouting brunette Jane Morris, and of course the Brotherhood will be racked by scandal when mild mannered Mr Millais does a bunk with desperate housewife Effie Ruskin. Was Ruskin really hiding in the closet with a pencil-drawn porn stash? It's as likely as the RA letting prostitutes stand proudly in front of the paintings they'd modelled for at private views, I suppose.

Still, I await next week's episode, complete with dream sequences, bonking and random casting (Mark Heap as Charles Dickens? I guess Simon Callow was too expensive or gave the script more than a cursory once over...) with eager anticipation. And I might do double culture this week by going to see the Waterhouse exhibition at the RA. I'll put some curlers in and see if any thrusting young artists want to depict me as an obscure Shakespearean heroine or a fallen woman. I don't get out of the bath for less than a tenner, mind.