Poldark’s become an MP, but will he take off his top at PMQs?
The Rt hon Ross Poldark MP — it doesn’t have quite the swashbuckling ring of Cap’n Ross. Now our saturnine hero is to take up his seat in Westminster, there will surely be a lot fewer of those moments in Poldark (BBC1) that set half the nation swooning.
The fine upstanding member for Truro can’t be stripping to the waist for Prime Minister’s Questions every week. The traditional cries of the house are ‘Order! Order!’ and ‘hear! hear!’ — not ‘Get ’em off!’
Poor old hugh the Poet was shirtless too, though he wasn’t well enough for the traditional Cornish pursuit of semi-nude scything. hugh (Josh Whitehouse) had brain fever, a dreadful condition contracted in a French prison: it causes headaches and an uncontrollable urge to chase after your best friend’s wife.
To cure him, that quack Dr Choake prescribed ‘ blistering, purging, vomiting, poulticing and bleeding’, with leeches all over his torso and a dose of trepanning to follow. hugh, being a chap with a wide vocabulary, knew that trepanning meant drilling holes in his head, and decided that dying would be a lot easier.
With no hugh to moon over her, and husband Ross away at Parliament, Demelza ( eleanor Tomlinson) might be facing some dull Sunday nights, standing and staring at waves from the clifftops. Let’s hope she doesn’t cope as badly as elizabeth, who deals with the ugliness of being Mrs Warleggan by splashing laudanum liberally into her teacup.
elizabeth’s only pleasure now is spite. She did all she could to wreck her husband’s chances of re- election, even though this means the nasty little weasel will be around the house much more. She’d better have ample stocks of laudanum in the larder.
heida Reed, as elizabeth, has perfected that bitter smile which reminds us she couldn’t be more miserable. When life delivers another stinging humiliation, out comes the smile. Lord knows what her face would do if she ever felt happy, though it isn’t likely the scriptwriters spend much time thinking about the eventuality.
That’s the pleasure of Poldark. It’s predictable, yet it manages to surprise us every week. This new series is doing it better than ever.
The fate of the england team in Russia is equally predictable. If you had any lingering shreds of optimism, Managing England: The Impossible Job ( BBC2) drubbed them into the ground.
Stone the crows, as Jimmy Greaves used to say, but this was depressing television. It began with Big Sam Allardyce, who was ousted in disgrace after just a couple of months in the role, pointing out that the title made no sense: ‘ It’s not an impossible job because people keep doing it.’
And it ended with Big Sam describing the emotion that will overwhelm him this evening as england face Tunisia — not excitement or patriotism, but ‘ jealousy’ because he feels cheated of his destiny.
In between, we saw every wretched penalty shoot-out and blunder that killed off our chances from Mexico in 1970 to Brazil in 2014.
By the time that clip came up of ‘Wally with the Brolly’ Steve McLaren sheltering from the pouring rain at Wembley, it was plain that whoever edited this documentary hated england’s football team. I suspect a Scottish National Party activist.
What we did learn was that england managers from Sir Alf Ramsey to Kevin Keegan and Sven-Goran eriksson like to talk about themselves in the third person. And Fabio Capello has a poet’s tongue: the memory of 1966 was ‘ a white ghost’ smothering players with its tentacles. Thanks a bunch, Fab.