Following on from the controversy which stemmed from Bernardo Bertolucci's admission that Last Tango in Paris actress, Maria Schneider, was unaware of his and Marlon Brando's intentions prior to the filming of a rape scene, a television producer has spoken out about the prevalence of these scenes in submitted scripts.

While discussing his selection process for the television version of The Exorcist with Variety Magazine, Jeremy Slater admitted he was stunned by scriptwriters' reliance on rape scenes.

Giving an insight into his work on the adaptation, he said: "One of my hard-and-fast rules when reading spec scripts was, the second that there was a rape that was used for shock value and that didn’t have any sort of narrative purpose, I threw the script aside."

Confirming that the approach was by no means rare, he added: "And I was shocked by the number that had that."

Shining a light on the regularity with which scriptwriters resort to rape scenes without any narrative purpose, Jeremy revealed that approximately 20 per cent of submissions contained at least one.

"I would say out of those 200 scripts, there were probably 30 or 40 of them that opened with a rape or had a pretty savage rape at some point."