Bridgerton returns for a new season that’s as silly as it is saucy

Bridgerton returns for part one of a third season that’s as silly as it is saucy, with Nicola Coughlan’s Penelope in fine form.

Luke Newton as Colin and Nicola Coughlan as Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton. Picture: Liam Daniel/Netflix

Bridgerton, the toff, tits and titles drama, is back for a third series. And, lordy, the intimacy co-ordinators have been busy. Get ready to desteam your spectacles, folks, because the sex has returned, too.

It’s all here: threesomes, oral sex, long scenes of amorous congress in a horse-drawn carriage and on a chaise longue, six-packs, naked breasts – well, obviously naked breasts. Swinging mammaries are kind of a given.

During the more chaste second series I wrote that the semi-inflated netball apparently used as a “barrier” between actors filming sex scenes to prevent the touching of “parts” had not been overly taxed. For this one they possibly needed back-up netballs. But hold your horses. Don’t get too excited. Because Netflix has split Bridgerton in half like it did The Crown, with four episodes now and four more in June. And some of the how’s-your-father comes in part two, which I’m not allowed to talk about but which, between us, is much the better half. That’s because of the plot, to be clear, not the posh rumpy-pumpy.

Obviously you never take Bridgerton too seriously: it pulls the shirt off Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) within the first six minutes. To be fair, it doesn’t often take itself seriously, what with the simpering man-hungry ladies’ almost parodic fan-fluttering, the hugely overmannered manipulations of Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) and the fondness for comic slapstick.

At one point it emerges that Penelope Featherington’s dim sisters, married and not getting pregnant, to the despair of their mother, Baroness Featherington (Polly Walker), don’t realise that penetrative sex is a basic requirement. “We kiss and then he makes an odd sound and then he goes to change his breeches,” says Philippa (Harriet Cains). “His breeches remain on?” her aghast mother squawks.

Be in no doubt, though, that this is Nicola Coughlan’s series. You are basically here for her. Without Coughlan’s luminous, showstopping performance as the shy, overlooked and underestimated wallflower Penelope Featherington, plus the frustrating will they, won’t they? dynamic between her and Colin, it would be a fairly shallow affair. I can see why Coughlan, the gifted Derry Girls actor, has said she has it written into her contract that Bridgerton provides a PG cut of the series for her Irish Catholic family. At a later point in the series they might have needed smelling salts. A shout out, by the way, to her quivering décolletage, which gets so much screen time it deserves to appear in the credits as a separate character.

Penelope, knowing she is dangerously close to being on the shelf because it’s her third year on the marriage market, undergoes a “glow up” in a desperate last attempt to land a husband. She changes her hair and wardrobe, and looks lovely, but then the series’ bitchy mean girl Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen) treads on her dress at a ball and accuses her of using cheap material.

There’s decent, hostile momentum between Penelope and Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie), who discovered last series that Penelope is the talented secret gossip diarist Lady Whistledown and is not best pleased. But it’s the chemistry between self-conscious Penelope and handsome, confident Colin, whom she overheard last series telling friends that he could never court, that makes this series, and Newton brings complexity and heft to a character who could easily have been a two-dimensional walking washboard. Coughlan is the one who manages to punch through this often stilted comedy of manners to offer real vulnerability and a sense of the fundamental human need to be loved in the middle of an aristocratic meat market. “I don’t want to die without ever being kissed,” she says tragically at one point. As you’ll see, that situation finds its remedy.

Bridgerton, streaming on Netflix.