Wentworth has aired the most graphic scene on Australian television

SPOILER ALERT — contains storylines from May 9’s Wentworth episode.

IT might well be the most gruesome moment in the history of the multi award-winning drama Wentworth. And that’s saying something.

The drama, which is shown on Foxtel’s showcase channel, saw Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson (Pamela Rabe) add involuntary tongue removal to her already alarming CV of dirty deeds.

To recap, The Freak blackmailed the prison nurse to get access to ‘Juicy’ Lucy Gambaro (Sally-Anne Upton) who was scheduled to have an dodgy tooth extracted by an external dentist.

Gambaro, Wentworth fans will remember, sexually assaulted Ferguson in a shower last season.

The patient Ferguson finally got her revenge this week. Dozing off on happy gas in the dental chair, Juicy Lucy wound up being straddled by Ferguson, who was wielding a surgical blade ready to make an unkind cut.

Her final words to Lucy: “You’ve licked your last p!@#y.”

Fans watched as Ferguson severed Lucy’s tongue — the victim then staggered out into the exercise area of the jail and coughed up blood and gore onto poor prison boss and birthday girl Vera Bennett (Kate Atkinson).

Bennett then got the worst birthday present ever on her desk — the tongue wrapped up in a box, Seven style.

Here’s the gruesome story behind Tongue-gate — a scene that is instantly iconic in Wentworth history.

Sally-Anne Upton was given the heads up about the pivotal scene at the start of this fifth series of Wentworth from the Foxtel show’s writers and producers.

“My first thought was ‘Oh no, I can’t do my one-liners and ad libs anymore with no tongue’,” Upton says. “But also I realised it’d be a real moment.”

The scenes in the dental chair took an extraordinary seven and a half hours to film.

“I’d done a bit of research on tongues. I’m a nurse too, nine times out of 10 someone will die from an incident like that because the tongue is so vascular. I knew we only had a short amount of time for me to get out into the courtyard. I was reading an article about a guy who had his tongue cut out because he knew too much.

“He said it was the most painful thing but he couldn’t scream. He couldn’t vocalise it. That’s why she screams and it’s that last cut and there’s no scream.”

MORE: Wentworth TV drama: The Freak cuts out Juicy Lucy’s tongue | Perth Now