The BBC has gone nuts for the 80s. The 1780s. On a Thursday you can do shagging and hanging and starving on an Australian beach in Jimmy McGovern’s convict drama Banished. And now there’s Sunday evening family swashbuckle, with the return of Poldark (BBC1).
After fighting, and nearly dying, in the American war of independence, Ross Poldark comes back, scarred, to his native Cornwall to find that his father has died, the family estate is in ruins, and his sweetheart is just about to marry his cousin. So he sulks, does things with big rocks, and gallops along the clifftop, magnificently filling his tight breeches and the imaginations of the nation’s female TV-watchers. Plenty of male ones too, I’d have thought.
Certainly it’s working for Elizabeth, the ex, whose passion is immediately rekindled. Trouble is, there’s Francis the wet cousin who … oops, she does marry, carelessly. And then it gets even more complicated when Poldark finds himself a street urchin servant boy … oh, who turns out to be a girl, Demelza, and who delouses (“crawlers” they call them) and scrubs up pretty well herself. You’d think Poldark would be happy, with a bit of rough and a well groomed thoroughbred (highly-strung, obviously, and quite annoying, but also undeniably hot) hankering after him, but he’s a moody bugger, plus he’s got money worries, so he shakes his own mane, and throws some more rocks about, and gallops off down the coast path. All of which makes him even more desirable.
I’m just a bit too young to remember the original 1970s Poldark, with Robin Ellis, but I tried to find the first episode on the internet in order to compare. Not 100% successfully, they wanted my credit card details and I worried that I’d end up funding Boko Haram. But I did find it dubbed into Spanish. (I imagine it went down well there, he could easily be a romantic Latin hero, and lover).
My Spanish isn’t good enough to understand everything, but I could get the general idea. And plotwise it’s pretty much the same, and the same as the novels by Winston Graham on which they’re based. Same triangular hat too, kind of head-samosa, or tricorn, I believe it’s called. But the new version goes at double the speed, gets to the end of old episode two (seriously, I watched two in Spanish!) by the end of new episode one. Perhaps it’s a reflection of shorter attention spans now, a demand for more speed, more action, better techniques and bigger budgets, but there’s a lot more sitting about talking, inside, in the old one. On the rare occasions it does venture outside, even Poldark’s horse plods along at half the speed. New Poldark is pacier and racier than the old, then, but built on the same chassis.
Could they have done a more interesting reinvention – brought it to the present day, with Ross returning home from a tour of Afghanistan, to find the family caravan park run down? Possibly. Obviously he would have known about his father’s demise, and it would be hard for Elizabeth to think Ross was dead, but she could have gone off with Francis, an uncharismatic local farmer maybe …
But Ross wouldn’t have been allowed those tousled locks in the military today, or got away with the breeches. Which is pretty much the point of Poldark. Aidan Turner does wear the breeches well, did I mention? And fills the boots once occupied by Robin Ellis. Ellis now writes cookery books, incidentally, for diabetics. So there’s something maybe to look forward to in the future Aidan.
The other major star – also rugged and gorgeous – is the coastline along which Poldark gallops. Dorset’s dead to me since the second series of Broadchurch, even if the Jurassic coast was about the only thing that didn’t disappoint. It’s all about Cornwall now, though. And that’s something else that’s much better here than in the Spanish-dubbed 1970s, when, on the few times it does venture out of doors, it’s drab and grey. Here, sparkling, it’s so much more than a backdrop. God it’s beautiful, who needs Croatia? This isn’t going to do Cornish tourism any harm at all, the Poldark effect.
We’ll be going. Well, we always do to be fair, but this has spurred me into booking. And there’ll be no haircuts between now and July. Where does one find breeches these days I wonder? And a tricorn.
