Hunktastic! Jan Moir’s verdict on Poldark
HE is so handsome that at first, you almost can’t look at him. Appearing in a swirl of cape and a glower of dark-eyed frowns, he wears a tricorn hat atop his Bible-black curls and has riding boots that crunch ominously when he walks.
Most importantly, a delicious thin scar, shaped like a serpent’s forked tongue, runs down his left cheek. Under a thunderous sky, beneath a cloud of infamy, at a moment when everyone least expected it, he has come home to his beloved Cornwall.
‘Back from the grave,’ is how he puts it. This is met with gasps of horror and delight, both on screen and off. For after an absence of 40 years, Poldark rides again.
In this new BBC adaptation of the celebrated Winston Graham novels, Aidan Turner stars as Captain Ross Poldark, the dashing rogue who has just returned from fighting the war of independence in America. Only to discover that his father is dead, his house is a wreck and his tin mines are derelict.
To make matters worse, the woman he loves, thinking him dead, is engaged to marry his milksop cousin, Francis. ‘Good God, Elizabeth. From the moment I set eyes on you, no one else existed!’ he cries, but it is too late.
Soon he hires a kitchen maid called Demelza to help out at his rotting Nampara estate, and thus begins one of the most enduring and popular love triangles of modern fiction.
With Heida Reed as Elizabeth, Kyle Soller as Francis Poldark, Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza and an absolutely crack supporting cast, the new Poldark got off to a tremendous start last night. Beautifully filmed on location in west Cornwall, it is ravishing in every way.
If the BBC are looking to find a Sunday night hit that’s as big as Downton Abbey, perhaps they’ve found it here in this seagull-squawking tale of mining folk by the sea. The scenery is peerless, the costumes divine and the script by Debbie Horsfield sticks closely to the novels.
In episode one, everyone is either fighting, crying or shouting at each other across guttering candles before roaring off to gallop a horse across the cliffs. Perfect.
And thank goodness for that. The original series, first shown in 1975, was one of the most popular period dramas ever produced by the BBC. Devoted fans, like me, worried that no new production could ever com- pete with the original, nor could any actors replace Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees, who were the perfect Ross and Demelza.
Yet the new Poldark crackles with energy, pace and few flaws. Yes, there are moments when Poldark’s glossy bob is a little too Michael Hutchence for comfort.
The cast have not gone for veracity with the Cornish accents, which is just as well. And a laughable brawl involving elaborately dentured peasants with teeth in 50 shades of grey merely ends up look- i ng as i f everyone has been machine-gunned with raspberry jam.
Yet as a passionate, absorbing saga of life and love in 18th-century Cornwall, the new Poldark shines in every way. It more than makes up for the disastrous, gloomy mumble-athon of last year’s BBC adaptation of Jamaica Inn.
Much of this is due to Turner, who has made his Poldark a hunktastic blend of Rhett and Mr Rochester, with a dash of Darcy thrown in for good measure. Moody and tortured in almost every scene, he gives tremendous good brood; he’s a boulder of smoulder hewn straight from some deep fissure in the Cornish rock. However, Turner is more than just a pretty boy and imbues the lovelorn captain with the right amount of gravitas and authority.
Whether thrashing a bully with a backhand whack of his riding crop or scrubbing the ‘crawlers’ from Demelza’s hair, this Ross is the boss. In austerity Cornwall, a place where evil bankers the Warleggans hold everyone to ransom, his moral code is inviolate.
MEANWHIlE, Elizabeth is a quivering beanpole in aubergine velvet, her pillowy lips trembling with suppressed desire. Has she married the wrong man? Flame-haired temptress Demelza has an impeccable complexion and an air of sexual awakening as the sun rises on her new life.
Cornwall looks beautiful in the limpid summer heat, with pink thrift on the cliffs and the hazy green slopes melting into the blue sea. Next week the temperature rises as Poldark has a Darcy moment and goes swimming naked. The week after that he’s in the fields with his shirt off.
ladies, you have been warned. This sexy Poldark is so, so much more than a bodice-ripper, but if there are bodices and if they must be ripped, then good god, Elizabeth, what better man to do it than Aidan Turner.