Desperate Romantics begins with the following disclaimer: “In the mid-19th century, a group of young men challenged the art establishment of the day. The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were inspired by the real world about them, yet took imaginative licence in their art. This story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inventive spirit.” Then the screen explodes with scams, seductions, drugs, scandal and plenty of cocky artistic attitude.

This is art history as a biopic of rock-star excess — Paint the Line, if you will. BBC2’s new drama has the pre-Raphaelites as the Rolling Stones or Sex Pistols of their day, outraging the Royal Academy, preaching their artistic gospel with the arrogance of the young and talented, and generally seducing strait-laced Victorian women of every class and background. They’re young, dumb and full of laudanum, in other words. It’s the kind of glorious retelling of artistic history that Ken Russell used to do so well — playful, flamboyant and fun — and it’s strange how rarely we find anything like it on our screens.

“I’ve always hated films about artists, because they always end up with Monet staring off into the distance and talking about the light,” says the writer Peter Bowker, whose diverse screen credits this year include the brutal Iraq drama Occupation and the costume finery of this autumn’s Wuthering Heights. “So I swore never to do one. But when this came up — well, for me, when I was growing up in the 1970s,

I thought the pre­Raphaelites were the greatest artists that ever lived. What they tried to do was very testosterone-fuelled. Look at the women they painted! Ophelia, the Lady of Shalott — all pale, long auburn hair, floaty dresses, the perfect sex symbols. The way those boys crashed through Victorian society: they invented a huge part of modern culture.”

Inspired by Franny Moyle’s book Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites, published earlier this year, which charts the artists’ chaotic affairs, Bowker picks out those themes from the brotherhood’s lives that resonate today. He focuses, for instance, on their desire for fame and attention, on their stunts — such as hiring a studio, persuading John Ruskin to attend their exhibition by a ruse, then posting their own review of his attendance — and on their initial rock’n’roll-style group identity, adding a PRB logo to their paintings, sometimes in place of a signature.

All of these details are true, but the story was, inevitably, a little more complicated. For one thing, there were essentially seven members of the group, although the series shows us only three — William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The show isn’t a lecture, however, it’s a bawdy, lustful retelling.

Thus, Desperate Romantics is interested in Hunt’s religious guilt. We see him struggle with self-loathing when seduced by a model who is also a hooker. When they finish, he catches sight of Christ’s face in a picture. “He looks disappointed,” Hunt says, grimacing. “Well, you painted him,” the girl points out reasonably.

We also see Millais’s struggle with principle, ambition and innocence. He rejects the chance to achieve solo success — despite being the prodigy of the age — to ensure that the brotherhood succeeds, but later accepts the frus­trated advances of John Ruskin’s wife, Effie, while pandering to his patron’s whims. We see their subtle rivalry — it’s Rossetti who has the idea for a fallen-woman portrait, but Hunt who exploits Ruskin’s interest with his study The Awakening Conscience, using his hooker model to play the disgraced innocent and shaming her publicly as a result. In the end, however, it’s the flamboyant Rossetti who holds centre stage.

“The thing that really interested me was that, although Millais is often regarded as the most gifted, it was Rossetti who was very much the leader of the group,” Bowker explains. “Everybody who met him said, ‘Charisma, charisma, charisma.’ He was very funny, and in his letters he’s always begging for money, or ‘tin’.

“I loved his politeness combined with a ‘give me everything you’ve got’ approach. I think we’ve all met or known people like this — women fall for them and men love their company. There was also a kind of Jim Morrison story to him: at the very end of his life, he wasn’t thin and beautiful, but corrupted and bloated.”

Bowker opens with the brotherhood’s search for a muse — they feel they teeter on the brink of greatness with a manifesto that damns all art since Raphael, but can’t quite produce the work to prove their genius. A fictional creation — their respectable admirer Fred Walters, who also narrates — introduces them to a shop girl, Lizzie Siddal, whose real-life look was at the heart of much of their fantasy medievalism. The story pivots on the moment when she steps onto the street and into their lives. Like a Marianne Faithfull or Patti Boyd, she’s buffeted on the updraft of their success, loving Rossetti, being used by the others and falling, gradually, into a fatal laudanum addiction. As she declines, the brotherhood dissolves, until Rossetti is left plundering her coffin for one last inspiration, one hit of fame.

This intense narrative, laced with guilt, infidelity, success and failure, is played to its considerable limits by a sharp young cast including Rafe Spall, Samuel Barnett, Zoe Tapper and Amy Manson as Siddal. Leading this crew, as the fiery Rossetti, is Aidan Turner, a hot newcomer who plays the vampire, Mitchell, in BBC3’s Being Human. The young Irish actor — 26, breaking through into fame, devastatingly good-looking and oozing charm — was surprisingly surprised to discover how easily he found the flamboyant artist’s character.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010