Worried about the naked man in War and Peace? Personally I’m glad the BBC has finally shown some balls

War and Peace: blink and you would have missed it. Not the entire 1,300-page epic squeezed tighter than Helene Kuragin’s corset into just six episodes of the BBC adaptation, but the moment on our screens on Sunday evening when a Russian lieutenant colonel emerged from a chilly lake wearing nothing but the blind bravery of an officer about to go into battle with Napoleon. The full-frontal male nudity gave social media fans and critics of the series a new hashtag – because #PhwoarandPeace was getting a bit passe – #WarandPenis.

As I don’t fancy Googling “full-frontal male nudity” without my ads going X-rated, I can only make an educational guess that this sort of shot is incredibly rare in television and film, even after the 9pm watershed. One viewer asked whether the scene was legal – which of course it is, as the member in question was more Michelangelo’s David than Tower of David. More potentially controversial were the scenes of the Battle of Borodino, including one showing Anatole Kuragin, a scoundrel who had tried to seduce hero Prince Andrei’s fiancée, having his severely injured bloodied leg cut off. The BBC said no complaints have been made and that all the scenes had gone through a “rigorous compliance process”. The Great British viewer has shown uncommon sense.

Yet the War and Peace nudity scene featuring actor Oscar Pearce is worth discussing. It is so refreshing, even if just for a day, to be talking about on-screen male nudity, or whether a man has enough clothes on, when it seems 364 days a year we obsess about what women are or are not wearing. After Susan Sarandon wore a black bustier underneath a white suit to the Screen Actors Guild awards last Saturday, it triggered a row about whether she was too old, at 69, to be wearing something that showed her cleavage, or whether it was appropriate for the Oscar winner to wear that outfit when she was introducing the “In Memoriam” section of the awards show. The broadcaster Ulrika Jonsson wrote yesterday: “At a public event you want people to be asking what you were wearing, not what the hell were you thinking.” Er, no, you want people to ask you about your career, or what you think about the nominees.

Every day women in the public eye are criticised or scrutinised for wearing too little, or too many, clothes. Female nudity in post-watershed television is a common feature. I’m not going to go all Mary Whitehouse and complain about this, and often it is not gratuitous but key to the storyline. It would just be refreshing if we could have more gender balance.

As Pearce said himself in an interview with The Sun (under the glorious headline “The Battle of Napoleon’s Boney Part”): “Full-frontal male nudity is quite rare whereas, women getting their breasts out happens the whole time. There was a part of me, the feminist side, which thought this would redress the balance.”

Last year, one scene in the BBC adaptation of Poldark, in which the male lead Aidan Turner appeared topless as he scythed a Cornish meadow, brought complaints from some male viewers that women were “objectifying” the actor – although Turner himself said he did not mind the attention. The scene was voted TV Moment of the Year 2015 at the National Television Awards, but perhaps it should have been given a prize for Only Moment of the Year a Man Was Topless or Naked on TV 2015. We already know who’s going to win that award this year, because Pearce’s brass monkeys bravery is likely to be a one-off in 2016.