Poldark review: Aidan Turner's stealth audition for 007
Over the past two series, Ross Poldark has proved himself to be many things: a soldier, a miner, a scythe-wielder, a probable sex offender. He's even become a husband and father. The one thing he's not been is a cunning linguist when it comes to putting his tongue to more foreign parts.
So sacré bleu! Ross has left his un-thumbed copy of 'Encore Tricolore: Book One' back at Nampara, and now he's in revolutionary France, where soldiers are carting enemies of the Republic off to the guillotine. And all the while he doesn't know how to ask the way to the discotheque in La Rochelle.
Good job his fluent chum Tholly (Sean Gilder) is with him or he'd be up merde creek. As they roam the streets and taverns, heads bowed, collars up, the locals are looking like a load of les miserables. Do you hear the people sing? Oui! Except it's not in France, but back in Cornwall, where the Carne Bros Roving Choir are in a pitched battle with George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) and his newly-bought church.
Still, it's a nicer noise than the one Aunt Agatha makes. Fair play to her though, she owns that fart like a boss. Not only does she joke about it, she uses it to Sherlock the shit out of where young Geoffrey Charles and Morwenna have been.
Bottom burps aside, episode three of series three quickly establishes that familiar dramatic contrast in Poldark: that of Ross being brave to the point of idiocy, and George being evil to the point of orgasm. Whether sentencing a man to the lash or preventing Sam (Tom York) and Drake (Harry Richardson) from operating a Methodist church on his land, he's never more smirk-riddled than when making other people's lives as miserable as possible.
As if to really hammer this home there's the brilliant juxtaposition of George being sworn in as magistrate and a French revolutionary being taken to the guillotine for a quite severe haircut. It's incredibly unsubtle imagery, but it works.
Easy though it is to 'boo-hiss' Warleggan – and it is! – it's difficult to entirely support Ross. The man is the master of cognitive dissonance. "I've had my fill of sailing close to the wind," he tells Tholly, as he sits in a tavern in the tumult of revolutionary France. Despite his words and his restraint when the saucy French barmaid makes a pass at him, he's willing to risk his life and his family's financial future, all in order to collect information on Dwight's whereabouts.
The whole affair looks like an accidental audition for Aidan Turner as a future James Bond. There's espionage, a foreign locale, cards, drinking, a beautiful seductress, innuendo ("Shall we inspect your papers upstairs?"), diving off a boat, fighting. Aidan Turner smoulders and looks unruffled throughout. It's Poldark, Ross Poldark. 006-pack. Licence to get topless.
Meanwhile, Head of SPECTRE (which here stands for Smirking Posh Egotistical Cornish Tosspot Romancing Elizabeth), George Warleggan has moved Elizabeth and "their" son to Truro, where she can dose herself up to the eyeballs with nerve tonic and he can further his ambitions to become a Burgess of the Borough.
Ross rides heroically back to the borough, although with bad news and without any duty free. It seems Dwight's dead. Except he's not! Although he may as well be. Our metrosexual medic is in the hell of a French prisoner-of-war camp, tending to the dying and the slightly more slowly dying, and also clearly tending to his hair and new hawt beard.
How, in the dark and groaning abyss of a PoW camp, can he look so well-groomed? Is he bribing French soldiers to bring him sculpting clay and beard oil? It is the show's greatest mystery.
The real hero of Poldark is less of a mystery – and despite all the testosterone spattering around it's not a dude. It's Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson). Think about it. She's putting up with her husband's amateur heroics while still having to gather firewood while pregnant, teach her brother to read, taking care of her child, the farm, and the mine, and deciding to have some agency of her own. The woman's a force of nature.
She lets her brothers have one of Ross's old storehouses as their new chapel, happily ending their ecumenical Escape to the Country-style search for a place to sing Heaven's Top 40 hits. Ross isn't pleased, but Demelza's quick to defend herself and make her husband see that t'int right, t'int fair, t'int fit, t'int proper for her to be the lackey.
Ross admits she's right. Good save, bro. This may be an episode that tries to keep him the hero, after his questionable actions in series two, but the fact is the only thing that's going to help Ross be a better man is his better half.
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