Power of Purity Is Tested in ‘Girl Like You’

In 1959, a new schoolteacher strides into a country town near London, tall and slender, young and innocent, delectable enough to nibble, springy blond hair bouncing like a Prell girl’s, face launching a thousand heartbeats.

Male eyes orbit this virginal body as if gazing French pastry through a bakery window. It seems that everyone wants Jenny Bunn, who awed Patrick Standish concludes is “just about the loveliest thing” he’s ever seen. So, naturally, he resolves to protect her virtue from everyone.

Except himself.

So begins “Take a Girl Like You,” Sunday’s tender, witty, intensely romantic, thoroughly charming two-part “Masterpiece Theatre” version of a Kingsley Amis comic novel that parts the conservative sexual mores of the ‘50s like the Red Sea.

A teacher at a posh private school, Patrick (Rupert Graves) has devoted his life to scholarship . . . and sex. His latest conquest is the headmaster’s teenage daughter, described by someone as “not exactly jail bait, but not far off.” But the harder Patrick tries to seduce Jenny (Sienna Guillory), the more she resists his touches. The more she resists, the more his testosterone rages. Because “that is how it was back then,” Patrick notes in a voice-over.

He is persistent and devilishly smooth, and she is increasingly attracted. But will this relationship consummate? The sexual dueling and libidinous tension heighten mercilessly under Nick Hurran’s confident direction. Andrew Davies affirms with this adaptation (as he did in writing “A Rather English Marriage”) his affinity for sly, urbane humor that comments on behaviors.

Some of which surfaces as Jenny’s lecherous landlord (Robert Daws) wants her, and his outrageous wife (Emma Chambers) lusts for Patrick.

Among the highlights here are a Noel Coward-esque weekend in the country, a very funny sex sequence, and another scene with Patrick going almost green when hearing an elderly playboy’s soliloquy on having sexual desires in his dotage without being able to act on them. “Not even the faintest little tingle.”

The cast is grand straight through. Guillory is fresh and minty enough to have been squeezed from a tube of toothpaste, and Graves is a huge kick in the kind of role that Hugh Grant frequently gets but botches by being Hugh Grant. In “Take a Girl Like You,” no botching.

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* “Masterpiece Theatre: Take a Girl Like You” airs Sunday and May 20 at 9 p.m. on KCET and KVCR. PBS has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).