‘THE BORGIAS’ : LAVISH BBC SERIES COMES TO CABLE

“The Borgias” is the “Our Family Honor” of haute TV, but much more fun to watch. The 10-part, 1981 BBC miniseries, opulently produced and lush with decadence, is airing now not on public television, as one would expect, but on the Arts & Entertainment Network, an advertiser-supported cable channel available in a limited number of markets. It continues through Dec. 4 (Wednesdays at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.).

While the series may eventually show up on PBS, it’s making its American premiere on A&E; as part of that network’s first-refusal agreement with the BBC, a pact in effect until 1990. If it were on PBS, “The Borgias” would easily qualify as the glittery centerpiece of the season. There hasn’t been quite such a hotsy-totsy item since “I, Claudius,” another pageant of decadence, which PBS imported in 1977.

Host Edwin Newman, playing Alistair Cooke for A&E;, introduced “The Borgias” as “one of the most lavish series ever produced for television” and called the Borgias “one of the most infamous dynasties in history.” The notorious transplanted Spaniards who presided over the Italian Renaissance left behind ripe pickings for future serializers. “The Borgias” drips with scandal and political intrigue.

It illustrates the rather inarguable proposition that the one most dominant continuum in all of human society has been corruption.

Merely as a thing, “The Borgias” is an artful object, entirely in keeping with the BBC’s high production standards. The interiors are radiant, the exteriors are verdant, and the tone of the whole thing seductively mordant. The rich historical gossip that is the essence of the program is hard to resist.

The character around whom most of the story swirls is Rodrigo Borgia, who in the first episode became Pope Alexander VI, a title he earned the old-fashioned way: with duplicitous politicking and bribery. Host Newman has taken pains to point out in his introductions that in those days, the papacy was a far more earthly institution than in modern times, and the Pope “a worldly prince, not a spiritual leader.”

Thus did Rodrigo celebrate his victory in the college of cardinals by, in part, stuffing grapes down the cleavages of female guests at an election night banquet. Later, he embarks on an incestuous affair with his daughter Lucrezia. It evolves that not only Rodrigo but also his bastard son Cesare lust after the famous poisoneuse. Lucrezia’s vial ways are legendary, but “The Borgias” portrays her more as a helpless operative than a Machiavellian manipulator.

Indeed, it’s Cesare who’s the real resident Machiavellian; Machiavelli based the ruthless character he created in “The Prince” on him. Rodrigo, meanwhile, is played with weighty, and indeed rotund, authority by Adolfo Celi, whose huge face seems a map of Italian history, certainly an icon of Roman character.

All this could be more delicious than it is. Certain aspects of the A&E; presentation of “The Borgias” are discouraging and make one wish PBS had gotten it first. For one, there are eight minutes of commercials per hour during the telecasts, as many as there would be on ABC (which is a part owner of A&E;), CBS or NBC. Newman’s participation is not limited to openings and closings; he pops up during the chapters as well with lead-ins to station breaks. He should be ashamed to be part of these interruptions.

Worse, A&E; censors have chopped several minutes from the serial in order to sanitize the nudity out of it. Surely the standards for a cable network devoted to the arts don’t have to be as numbingly innocuous as those for the regular commercial broadcast networks, or is the same kind of dullardly mindset at work? It’s not as if the trimmed scenes were pornographic. They played in England without causing any riots. Nudity does seem relevant to a tale of exhibitionistic dissipation.

Some of us, when we think of the Borgias, think of the late Orson Welles, because he mentioned them in a famous speech he made in Carol Reed’s movie “The Third Man.” Welles played the corrupted Harry Lime, who told a friend philosophically, “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Despite the drawbacks of presentation, “The Borgias” promises to be rewarding and entertaining. As television, it has the wit, sparkle and wallop of a genuine event.