There’s more to treasure in Poldark than Aidan’s chest

Poldark BBC One, Sunday BBC Two, Tuesday

he first episode of the new series of was beautifully shot, cleverly plotted and finished with a well-worked cliffhanger. Not that a large portion of the audience will have given two hoots – the real interest was in a pair of plump pecs.

Aidan Turner’s chest has become a drama all of its own. How many glimpses would we get? Would it be shaved or sprouting, buff as a bag of beachballs or sinuous and lithe? And by the by, is it OK, in 2016, to objectify a man’s body in a way that would be offensive to a woman? Now what was that television show I was supposed to be watching?

It must be infuriating for the writer Debbie Horsfield and the producers to have come up with a great series that about 50 per cent of the viewers are watching for the wrong reason. It creates a slight conundrum for series two – do you give your public what they want and let them all have repeated ogles of Aidan’s assets, or do you remain high-minded and risk the realisation that there was only one reason people were watching Poldark?

Episode one of this new series tried to have its chest and eat it too. A mere 10 minutes in, there was Aidan, sweatily hewing a bit of rock down his mine for no obvious reason. Surely the chest-ival had begun? But he kept his shirt on. Later on he was hewing again, but this time it was pecs out, hammer in hand, grease smeared on like an Eighties Levi’s ad.

The good news for Poldark fans who aren’t that bothered about Turner’s chest is that there remain plenty of other aspects to the show about which to obsess. In particular, there’s much delight to be had in some of Horsfield’s use of language, not least her Shakespearean zest for a well-honed insult: where else would you find a woman called “a notorious doxy” or a man compared to a piece of lank bladderwrack?

My favourite character in Poldark is Auntie Agatha, played by Caroline Blakiston. You simply can’t beat a

Tgood old crone, sitting in the shadows, passing judgment on the action while flipping tarot cards like a dowager countess crossed with a weird sister.

Mostly, though, I am still tantalised by how the show can’t seem to decide on the pronunciation of its own name. Some characters have gone for PolDARK, like Polzeath, while others opt for POL-dark, as if his first name were Paul. It might seem trivial, but then, two years ago, you’d have said the same about the sight of a man’s nipples.

Cwas the defining New Labour comedydrama, commissioned in the mid-Nineties so that British thirtysomethings would see some kind of representation of themselves, their lives and their penchant for terrible jangly guitar music on television. The problem with bringing it back is that the original target audience are all now fiftysomethings. The actors we all loved – James Nesbitt, Hermione Norris, Fay Ripley, John Thomson and Robert Bathurst – have all moved on, too. I approached the new series with the same curious dread that I approach the reformation of a once-loved band, safe in the knowledge that those old

Is it OK, in 2016, to objectify a man’s body in a way that would be offensive to a woman?

tunes that once seemed like lifedefining art will now sound like, well, terrible jangly guitar music.

Darn it, then, if there wasn’t something rather endearing about this reunion. Inevitably the plot was forced – Adam (Nesbitt) had been living in Singapore; a sudden romance brought him back to the UK to ask his old friends if they would come to the wedding. But what made Cold Feet Mark 2 work was precisely those old friends. There is an alchemy to putting a group of disparate actors together in front of a camera and asking an audience to believe that they are real friends. Usually actors who spend years together cooped up in trailers and wearing the same clothes end up hating each other. But whatever the magic formula is, the Cold Feet cast always had it, and they still do.

was yet another riotous comedy co-created by Sharon Horgan, who struck gold with Catastrophe last year and whose The Circuit went