JAN MOIR’s view on the much-anticipated new season of Poldark

How has Poldark become a boring Bond in britches? JAN MOIR’s view from the sofa on the much-anticipated new season of hit period drama

Once more into the britches, dear friends. The hour has come for Captain Poldark to ride forth to do battle against evil and the havoc the Cornish squalls can play with a man’s ringlets.

What I want to know is, why does he bother with endlessly righting wrongs on the moral high ground when he could be safely at home making haste with the curling tongs and firm-hold hairspray? Why, you ask? Because he’s worth it.

Poldark (BBC1) returned last night for the fifth and final series starring Aidan Turner as the dashing captain and Eleanor Tomlinson as his ageless wife, Demelza. We find ourselves at the dawn of the 19th century amid enlightenment for all.

Poldark (BBC1) returned last night for the fifth and final series starring Aidan Turner as the dashing captain and Eleanor Tomlinson as his ageless wife, Demelza 

For a start, although he has not physically aged, Poldark is no longer the moody and tortured hothead

We find ourselves at the dawn of the 19th century amid enlightenment for all 

However, life in Cornwall is still drear m’dear. Death hangs overhead like a tarry shadow; Elizabeth is dead, Dwight and Caroline’s daughter is dead, Jago is dead, Verity might as well be dead, the blind poet that Demelza snogged in the sand dunes is presumably dead, while my hopes for this new series are on a life-support machine.

For a start, although he has not physically aged, Poldark is no longer the moody and tortured hothead; the infamous bodice-ripper with the whipcrack scar and the jaunty tricorn hat that we all loved. Instead he is just, whisper it, a little bit boring and pious.

Over the previous four celebrated series, Poldark had been many splendored things. A soldier and a farmer, a topless scyther, a forgiven adulterer and a skinny-dipper of rare magnificence.

No matter what he did, he was always the kind of heartbreaker who made local women want to tempt him with their freshly- whipped syllabubs and at some point along the way, he even impregnated the wife of his sworn enemy George Warleggan (Jack Farthing). But now?

One minute our boy was in a boat amid the glittering brilliance of a Cornish bay, happily catching fish for tea. The next he was in a London theatre

One minute our boy was in a boat amid the glittering brilliance of a Cornish bay, happily catching fish for tea. The next he was in a London theatre, foiling an attempt on the prime minister’s life, showing such brilliant powers of deduction and derring-do that he is immediately recruited as a spy.

‘His Majesty’s government could always find a covert role for someone with your skills,’ he is informed. The name is Poldark. Ross Poldark. This From Cornwall With Love plotline finds us at an unhappy junction. For the previous four series, Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield has adapted her scripts straight from the celebrated Winston Graham novels. For this series she has gone rogue. And left to her own devices, it is hard not to see the fashionable stranglehold of modern political correctness making its presence felt with all the charm of a rotting pilchard tossed into the punchbowl.

The themes she has chosen include interracial marriage and mental health issues – hardly hot topics in 1800s England

Elizabeth is dead, Dwight and Caroline’s daughter is dead, Jago is dead, Verity might as well be dead, the blind poet that Demelza snogged in the sand dunes is presumably dead, while my hopes for this new series are on a life-support machine

The themes she has chosen include interracial marriage and mental health issues – hardly hot topics in 1800s England. Yet they have been bolted on to the Poldark substructure with relish, while the modish tendency to lecture television audiences instead of entertain them has sadly proved irresistible.

During her researches Horsfield managed to find a contemporaneous mixed-race husband and wife team, in the form of Colonel Ned Despard (Vincent Regan) and his wife Kitty Despard (Kerri McLean).

It is fascinating that they really did exist, but equally tiresome that they are used to remind viewers at every opportunity that the slave trade was a terrible thing, you know. Or to have Kitty giving abolitionist speeches to rapt audiences in London taverns. ‘What is it that corrupts the milk of human kindness? It is the single-minded pursuit of profit. Before my husband freed me, first he bought me,’ she says, adding that she hopes for a ‘time when all voices will be recognised’.

During her researches Debbie Horsfield managed to find a contemporaneous mixed-race husband and wife team, in the form of Colonel Ned Despard (Vincent Regan) and his wife Kitty Despard (Kerri McLean) 

The Cornish mob are impressed. ‘Yes,’ nods Dr Enys (Luke North) with approval. ‘She is quite the firebrand.’ It pains me to report that he really did say that.

For even given the technical constraints of a plot-setting opening episode, the cheese-laced script creaked under the solid teak of period-drama cliche. ‘It seems as if there are dark forces at work,’ says one character. ‘It is such a bore being an orphan,’ says an orphan. Poor old Poldark had to wrap his handsome teeth around this one: ‘If I am not mistook, he asks me to take on the Government, the Crown, the Empire, the slave trade, did I miss anything?’ No darling, you did not. Meanwhile, Demelza is worrying that we will have forgotten the vagaries of her marriage to this nutcase. ‘Dear Lord, Ross. Why didn’t I marry an ordinary man?’ she wonders.

Even the evil George Warleggan has been defanged. Instead of plotting the downfall of Poldark and every starving peasant in Cornwall as per normal, he has started hallucinating about his dead wife. George is seeing things, and for once they are not pound signs dancing before his venomous eyes. He is struggling with his mental health and in later episodes, Dr Enys will be giving him bereavement therapy treatments, involving essential oils and massage.

This is Poldark-lite, with much of the action set in London, not Cornwall. Already I miss the ravishing seascapes and the savage penitence that once seemed to infuse Captain Poldark. Instead we are wading into a quagmire of modern sensibilities and preachifying as he turns into James Bond in britches. T’aint proper. T’aint right. 

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