Rob Lowe might have got there first but the most notorious celebrity sex tape of the 80s and 90s surely belonged to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. On a surface level, the Baywatch star and Mötley Crüe drummer may have seemed to be an ideally matched pairing but chaos and conflict were never far off. The quasi-accidental theft of a video cassette upended their lives, created headlines across the world, inspired talk-show hosts (and their writers) towards eruptions of glee, and made a slew of dodgy entrepreneurs realise that people watching other people having sex on the internet could be a big-bucks industry.

As the eight-part Pam & Tommy drama occasionally suggests, maybe they had it coming. Certainly, Tommy Lee was often an unpleasant dude/horrible asshole who is shown withholding payment and pointing a rifle in the face of a builder who was less ravished with wealth. So when righteous vengeance is pursued (in the form of a stolen safe containing their salacious home movie), it's hard to feel much sympathy as one unforeseen consequence follows another for the LA couple.

Except that is to ignore the innocent victim in all this: Pamela Anderson. Despite what you may think of her brain power or career choices, the slating she received from Saturday Night Live scribes and the gurning likes of Jay Leno is nothing short of despicable. Especially when you set that against the torment suffered by Tommy Lee which amounted to a big fat zero. Sure, he had bar brawls with other dudes/assholes who slated his band and insisted that this sex tape was the only good thing he'd released in years. But he was never pregnant or had a miscarriage or asked disgraceful questions at press conferences, but simply went about his merry rockstar way, believing the world simply owed him.

Across eight episodes, Pam & Tommy wouldn't have looked out of place as part of Ryan Murphy's American Crime Story series which has quite the fixation with 90s scandal. Though whether Murphy would have included scenes of Lee having a conversation with his (animatronic) penis is a debate for another day. As Anderson and Lee, Lily James and Sebastian Stan are revelations, utterly transforming themselves into tabloid monsters and fallible human beings with every single wart and all laid bare while Seth Rogen is enjoyable as the man who had enough of Lee's BS and attempted to capitalise on the VHS booty that had inadvertently fallen into his lap.

But this show's tone of preposterous comedy (see animatronic penis) and over-reliance on how hilariously funny it was that people in the mid-90s didn't understand the internet ('what is a web….site?') falls mostly flat. But worse, it utterly dismisses the pain felt by an actual victim of this tawdry crime, and feeds into a media perception that some people just have it coming.

Pam & Tommy begins with three episodes on Disney+, Wednesday 2 February, followed by weekly episodes.