With so much firewood chopping, no wonder Poldark is hotting up

This year’s macho stance is legs spread wide, wood-axe in both hands, chopping logs for kindling. The Cap’n was at it last week in Poldark (BBC1), his last act of manliness before he left his wife to face trial for his life.

Now his friend Dr Enys (Luke Norris) was beside the woodpile, pausing every few moments to cuff the sweat from his eyes and gaze broodily at the camera before swinging his chopper again.

Deep in his tin mine, his torso glistening in the fiery light of the torches, Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner) was going at it hammer and tongs. he had a chisel in his fist, battering it as though he intended to carve Mother Earth open all the way down to hell. The Cap’n was in a dark mood, so angry that you almost felt sorry for the rocks.

We could pretend these scenes were necessary for the story, but you know (and psychoanalyst Dr sigmund Freud would have, too) that’s not strictly true. This is racy fantasy masquerading as historical drama — sex And sensibility.

Meanwhile, wicked George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) was learning the noble art, in a flouncy shirt and a pair of expensive boxing gloves. he threw his punches like a child in a strop trying to snatch a sweetie from his nurse.

in 18th-century Cornwall, real men hit hard and didn’t need to put their clothes on to do it. Weakling villains swiped their hands about like little girls and wore lace collars. Feeble Francis (Kyle soller) wants so much to be a Real Man. he even had a go at scything, the most virile activity known to agriculture.

The sad fact is, he’s useless — when he put a pistol to his head, his powder was so damp that he couldn’t even blow his own brains out.

some readers may be of a modest and delicate disposition, and to spare their blushes we needn’t spell out what the sexual psychologists would say. But it’s not difficult to guess the true nature of the problem in Cousin Francis’s marriage, nor why his wife Elizabeth, played by heida Reed, goes rigid every time she sees Ross.

At least, i think she was going rigid — though it might just have been her acting. she has been so wooden this series that she’s in danger of being chopped for firewood by Dr Enys.

The marvellous Phil Davis was stiff as a board, too, but that was because his character — drunken good-fornothing Jud — had been beaten to death by the Cap’n’s enemies.

i vividly remember that episode from the original seventies series, and my boyish relief when Jud turned out to be not dead, but dead-drunk.

This time, i knew he would rise again — but i was no less delighted to see him alive, and scaring the parish witless in his burial sheet. Davis looked like he was enjoying it, too.

There’s not much chance that anyone who sat through Celebrity Island (C4) will remember anything of it 40 years, or even 40 minutes, later.

Bear Grylls shanghaied ten TV personalities whose faces were, at best, faintly familiar, and marooned them on his Pacific island — the one he keeps well stocked with snakes, caiman crocodiles and other beasties.

The celebs were everything you’d expect — which means all of them are thicker than fossilised rice pudding.

They share the same monotonous vocabulary, constantly saying ‘literally’ and ‘basically’ and the F-word — the typical sentence was, ‘we’re literally f **** d, basically’. if they weren’t all literally illiterate, they might have read some survival manuals before their adventure.

But they hadn’t, which was why they had to radio for help from Bear’s offshore mothership, not once but twice, before they’d even eaten their starter pack of supplies. And they still managed to half-kill a cameraman.

One of them had given up before the end of the episode. he was a tiny chap with curly hair, and his name was Aston Merrygold — i assumed he was a hobbit, but apparently he was from a littleknown boy-band.

hotelier Mark Jenkins summed up their first week: ‘We’re doomed, aren’t we?’

he’s literally right, basically.