FRIDAY lunchtime. Stuart Bowman is sitting in a café in Paris waiting for his charcuterie to arrive and talking about nudity. Or rather the lack of it in his case.

Bowman, who you probably already know as the martinet Sergeant Thomson in Gary Tank Commander, is one of the stars of the much-ballyhooed new French television drama, Versailles, which begins on BBC2 this week. (You'll have seen the trailers on the BBC; they've been running forever, it feels like.) Hugely successful in France, the series has already prompted shock-horror headlines in the British press. You know the kind of thing. "Filthiest TV ever." "The most graphic sex scenes ever on British TV."

One Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen (no, me neither), has even suggested the series is pornographic. "There are channels where, if you wish to view this sort of material, you would have to pay for it," he has said.

The press has got itself so hot under the collar, it's even been reported that Bowman had a non-nudity clause in his contract. That's not strictly true, he tells me. What that relates to is the fact that actors will be told if nudity is part of the role, he explains. It will say so on the script. "If you don't they will tell you. They say 'no nudity'. That's what was on my page."

I'm sure you were disappointed, Stuart. "If these things are necessary for telling the story …" he demurs.

Anyway, he says, he can't imagine anyone will be thinking Versailles is the "filthiest TV show ever" when they watch it. Yes, there are sex scenes. Yes, there is nudity. But nothing, despite what Mr Bridgen might suggest, that you'd have to pay for.

"I saw the show for the first time and I thought the sex scenes were fabulous for what they did in telling the story, about the relationships between the characters.

"People had sex in those days as they do now. That's why they're there."

As well as the sex scenes, Versailles is famous for being hugely expensive (there are some reports suggesting that each episode cost more than £2m) and for having more than its share of Brits in front of and behind the camera (the showrunners Simon Mirren and David Wollstonecraft are English, so is Louis himself in the shape of George Blagden; Bowman, Dollar Academy graduate turned expat Londoner who's playing Louis's valet Bontemps, is there representing Scotland).

But the real shock horror scandal is that this prime example of French prime-time telly is an English-language production. Mon dieu! You have to wonder is that even allowed? What will the Académie Francaise say?

"It's real politik," Bowman suggests. "If you want to reach a big audience … And it's borne out by the sales; they've sold it to 136 countries. I'm pretty sure that would not have happened if it had been in French, it's as simple as that."

Haven't there been riots in the streets of Montmartre at the very idea? "We've got to know quite a lot of French people and that outrage has certainly not been reflected in my experience speaking to them."

Well, indeed. The first series has been a huge success in France and Bowman is already filming the second series. He and his family (wife and two young boys) have decamped to Paris for the duration (some six months). His older son, who's four, is already a fluent French speaker.

So maybe the real question is, how did this happen? How did Bowman, who has been seen more on the stage than the screen, end up as one of the central characters of the biggest French TV show in years? (As the King's valet Bontemps, he is in most scenes. "I think I'm doing 80 out of 110 days, which is quite a lot," he says of the shooting schedule for series two.)

Quite simple, really. The assistant casting director saw him on stage at the Globe Theatre and thought he'd be great for the part of Bontemps, a man who was one of the richest people in France, yet spent his nights sleeping in a cot at the end of the king's bed.

Versailles is the story of the Sun King's attempts to transform Versailles from a hunting lodge into a residence fit for a king. Throw in the aforementioned sex scenes, the odd spot of rather graphic violence and themes of brotherly love and rivalry and you have a TV show. Bontemps is, Bowman, suggests, "the most loyal man I've ever played. The king is at ease with him and therefore confides in him and trusts his judgement.

"He was liked almost universally. He didn't abuse his power. In fact, the opposite. He was terribly modest. If he'd done something to help someone politically or socially and they came to thank him he would turn them away and get very embarrassed. He would be pissed off with them thanking him. To our condescending political movers and shakers these days that's almost unthinkable."

Ah yes, politics. Because here's the thing. My problem is not with the sex scenes nor the English dialogue (my French is so rusty I need a tetanus shot every time I try to speak it). It's the fact that France – the country that would, less than a century after the events portrayed in Versailles, cut off a king's head and not replace him with another at a later date – is now giving us what amounts to aristoporn. Do you have to be posh to get your story told on TV these days?

Bowman isn't having this. "Look at Happy Valley, which is the success story of British drama that I've enjoyed recently," he says. "That's very much a working-class story."

I'd say that is the exception rather than the rule, I tell him. "Would you? War And Peace? I think the working class were reflected in that."

Anyway, he says, Versailles feels very relevant. "If you want to talk about reflecting what's going on in society, it is looking at the people who are running the country and running the world. The tiny proportion of people that are wielding the power at the moment is pretty much reflected in Louis XIV's court. So, plus ça change, I would say."

In short, the only thing that's changed are the costumes. How are the costumes, by the way? Like the sets, he says. Splendid. "They fit perfectly. You look in the mirror, you feel a different person. We're walking in high heels but you naturally adopt a different gait. These costumes make you feel a certain way."

Is he planning on smuggling any of them home at the end of the shoot? "I don't think I'd get away with walking through the streets of Hackney in these costumes. But there are pieces of furniture that I've certainly got my eye on."

Time for the flashback sequence. Stuart Bowman's story begins in Dundee and he grew up in Newport-on-Tay until his mum died when he was 12. He then went as a boarder at Dollar Academy where he got a taste for acting. "I went to my English teacher and asked if he thought I could become an actor and he said categorically no. I was quite a naughty schoolboy and so I kind of put it out of my mind and did business studies for a couple of years in Galashiels. But it was there in the back of my mind. I had loved doing it but there was no focus for it."

He did apply for drama school – learning his monologues on the overnight bus to London – but didn't get in. Instead, he got a job as an assistant works manager of a precast concrete firm in Monifieth. "Didn't enjoy that very much funnily enough."

He must have been OK at it though. They offered him a promotion to Dundee. Instead, he ran for the hills. Or Edinburgh anyway. He trawled round all the theatres asking for a job, got one at the Lyceum working in the bar. That's where he met Billy McColl, "a lovely actor who died recently. He was playing Jimmy Boyle at the Lyceum and we got talking and I said I tried to go to drama college but didn't get in. He said, 'I'll come in early every night and help you with some speeches.' I applied to the college he went to and because of the help he'd given me, I got in."

That was in 1986 and Bowman has had a long and fruitful stage career in the three decades since. There have been TV and film roles in that time. The inevitable appearances in Holby City, Taggart, the odd film role in Young Adam and, more recently, Slow West, but if you know him for anything you'll know him for playing Sergeant Thomson in Gary Tank Commander. Soon coming to an SSE Hydro near you of course. Bowman can't wait to see the script.

He raves about Gary's creator, Greg McHugh, and his recent election interviews with the leaders of the Scottish political parties. "It was so clever on so many levels without showing off about his cleverness. It cut through the political bullshit. And that's what his show does as well. Gary has latched on to the essence of what people say and the effects of what politicians do on real people.

"There have been theses written on Gary Tank Commander and I can understand why. All of that aside, Greg's got funny bones and that's probably the main thing."

Well, yes. McHugh is funny, talented, young. Don't you just hate him? Bowman, meanwhile, turned 50 last year. "I was dragged kicking and screaming into my sixth decade," he says. "It was crap. My image of myself doesn't equate with that number at all. It's too big a number to go with how I feel."

Really? I say. I'm of an age and I feel every bloody one of those years, especially every time I walk by a mirror. "Yeah," he concedes, "and I tell you what. Doing a show like this doesn't help, with 25-year-old beauties everywhere. You are reminded every second of every single scene."

Still, things are good. He's living in France, he's not having to take his fancy clothes off and he's got the weekend off to spend with his family. What, I wonder, does the word "ambition" mean for him now in the wake of Versailles?

"I hope that this allows me to meet writers and directors that I wouldn't have had a sniff at three years ago. I hope that some of them see my work and go, 'Yeah, he's good enough to work with me'."

So who's the dream date, in filmmaking terms? "The Coen Brothers. At their best … OK, I'm not turning them down. Not quite at their best, I'll give them a go."

Versailles begins on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.30pm