Poldark: why the drama is perfect Sunday night entertainment

BBC One’s Poldark, a rehash of an idea from the Seventies, is a stereotypical swashbuckling romance, stuffed full of cliché and as sickly-sweet (some might also argue as hollow) as a large chocolate egg.

Yet ratings are buoyant around the (vastly impressive) seven million mark. Scar-faced, skinny-dipping, scythe-wielding hero Ross Poldark, played with smouldering stares and tousled locks by Irish actor Aidan Turner, has become a heart-throb of “ooh Mr Darcy” proportions, arousing passion in female viewers old enough to know better. While flame-haired Eleanor Tomlinson, aka urchin-turned-maid-turned-wife Demelza, is also attracting her own fanbase.

The programme looks gorgeous - the rolling Cornish landscape shares top billing with Turner and Tomlinson. And it’s more action packed than a generously filled Cornish pasty: the show passed its halfway point, for instance, with a typically pacy Easter episode that featured a birth, a bankruptcy, a wedding, a Shakespeare play, a riot and a romantic reunion.

All of which makes for supremely satisfying Sunday evening entertainment. So much so that Poldark has become a minor TV phenomenon that to rival the excitement there once was around the original.

The truth is that partial as we Britons might be to a Sunday night period drama, we don’t like them to be too taxing. A roast dinner might have been consumed, a country walk completed or tipple taken. Our mind might be turning to the onerous duties of Monday morning. Sunday night is a time for escapism and relaxation, for the glorified soapiness of Downton Abbey or the soppy social comedy of Pride & Prejudice. There’s a reason why the BBC scheduled Wolf Hall for midweek - it was far too dark, dense and demanding for Sundays.
Writer Debbie Horsfield’s new adaptation of Winston Graham’s novels isn’t a nuanced work of multi-layered genius - baddies and goodies are clearly signposted, expositional dialogue clunks and characters spend lots of time gazing longingly out to sea or lustfully at each other - but it makes for handsome, sweeping, compellingly populist drama. Episode five climaxed with a cliff-top speech from our pouting protagonist: “The world is a harder place now, thanks to Julia [his baby daughter]. The stakes are higher, losses more painful. Yet my life is more precious for being less certain and richer for being poorer.” Hardly subtle but it was rousing, spine-tingling stuff. Much like Poldark as a whole..