BBC’S Luminaries keeps the viewers in the dark

ACCORDING to the director of The Luminaries, BBC One’s new Sunday night drama, its moody lighting was intended to create “a sense of mystery and intrigue”.

Unfortunately, with scenes so dark, the plot remained a mystery to many.

The launch of the series, adapted by Eleanor Catton from her own Booker Prize-winning novel, attracted a slew of complaints from viewers. It is the latest BBC drama to irritate audiences with its bad lighting, after Taboo and Wolf Hall. The episode drew an audience of 5.3million, the second biggest BBC launch of the year behind The Salisbury Poisonings, but it remains to be seen how many viewers will return.

The drama is set during the New Zealand Gold Rush of the 1860s and stars Eve Hewson, above, as Anna Wetherell, a young woman who seeks her fortune but quickly finds herself at the mercy of unscrupulous characters. Claire Mccarthy, the director, said: “The colour palette is more gothic and grounded in the shadows. We wanted a sense of mystery and intrigue and a kind of burnished golden world inside the interiors.

“We were very influenced by gold and how it would appear on screen, but also just the way that we would light largely through flame, candlelight and natural light. We were trying to inhabit the kind of world and the resources that they would have at that time so we embraced that as a visual aesthetic.”

The BBC’S Points of View programme asked via social media if the programme “lit up your Sunday night, or were you left in the dark?”

The responses included “confusing, dark and no idea what was going on”. Another said: “Who, what and when – all muddled in the first episode.”