By my calculations, the remake of Poldark (BBC1, Sunday) is the first time BBC drama has returned to Cornwall since that famously mumbling Jamaica Inn — which may explain why even the lowliest yokel here tends to project from the diaphragm. Leading both the cast and the diaphragm-projection is Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark, initially seen as a British Redcoat in a wood rather unconvincingly captioned ‘Virginia, America, 1781’. The short scene that followed efficiently established that he had a rackety past and some politically radical ideas, before the American rebels attacked, leaving several extras dead. Ross himself suffered injuries bad enough to bring on a severe case of flashback, as he deliriously remembered how he and a wild-haired woman used to run about the Cornish cliffs in slow motion while laughing a lot and swearing eternal love.
And with that, we cut to Cornwall two years later, where Ross’s homecoming wasn’t going terribly well — what with his father being dead, the family estate bankrupt, the family tin mines flooded and that wild-haired woman not only immaculately coiffured, but also engaged to somebody else in the belief that Ross was dead. No wonder that for a while he stuck to a rigid regime of staring moodily out to sea.
The new Poldark has a strong supporting cast, including the much-missed Warren Clarke doing his gruff no-nonsense act one last time as Ross’s Uncle Charles. Even so, at this stage, the programme appears to be pinning most of its hopes on Aidan Turner’s sex appeal — which, let’s face it, is not an especially risky strategy. Certainly, Turner can brood with the best of them. He’s also good at that thing women seem to like: constantly alternating between being nice and being horrible.
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