There’s a new bit of man candy on the scene, ladies, Aidan Turner is our latest period drama crush. Move over Mr Darcy, you’ve got some serious competition!

If you managed to catch BBC Two’s Desperate Romantics last night, then you won’t have failed to notice Aidan strutting his stuff as the shows' Casanova, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Desperate Romantics is a six-part drama set in 19th century London following the group of dysfunctional male romantics from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a vagabond group of painters, poets and critics, who spend their time trying to find fame, fortune, love and quite a lot of sex.

Casting this impossibly attractive young man as the notorious womaniser Rossetti was a stroke of genius and although the show may be far from historically accurate, we actually don’t care, as long as we have plenty of time to watch Aidan brooding.

Aidan describes Rossetti as an “absolute free spirit” and the character lets Turner explore his bad boy side. The shows full of sex and scandal, so there’s a lot of flesh, and when asked about getting naked, Aidan told Newsbeat, “You get into it and you do it and all the girls do it, there’s no qualms, there’s no inhibitions, you just get your clothes off and get it on.” How we wish we’d kept up our acting classes…

Here are some fun facts about Aidan:

1.    He’s Irish, as if he needed a reason to be any better-looking
2.    He starred in BBC Three’s Being Human as vampire Mitchell
3.    He was in the first episode of The Tudors, as Bedoli, but was uncredited

Take a look at our gallery of Aidan Turner pictures, but be warned there may be no going back…