Hunky hero can't save dull drama

Aidan Turner in the 2015 BBC remake of Poldark.

Aidan Turner smoulders as Poldark in a 1780s period drama set in Cornwall. Here are some things you should know about Ross Poldark, the star of Prime's new 18th century "drama" Poldark (8.30pm, Wednesdays). The first is that he has very nice hair. He has lovely curly dark locks which look very appealing matched with his manly stubble and a tricorn hat.

Another thing: he has lovely eyes. They're all dark and smouldering and, well, like inky windows into his troubled soul. Then there is his terrifically masculine jaw - how it juts when things aren't going his way! - along with his manly furrowed brow. And when he gets his top off, well, Phwoah!

Whether this is exactly how the late British author Winston Graham imagined the hero of the 1.3 million (this is a rough estimate; it may have been just seven) Ross Poldark books he banged out between the 1940s and the 1970s, I have no idea. But it is clear that if you want punters to watch your TV adaptation of the adventures of young Ross Poldark in the year 2015, then you had better beef-up the beefcake.

Mind you, on the evidence of this week's premiere episode of this remake of Poldark (I have vague recollections of seeing the original 1970s adaptation), our hero is very much your dear old mum's idea of romance. Our Rossy is a harmless sort of beefcake, a hero who wears nice clothes, rides a lovely horse around the Cornwall countryside, looks windswept and interesting on cliff tops, pines a lot for a love lost and occasionally gets his top off when performing manly tasks. He's sexy, but as safe as a nice cup of tea.

Which is to say he's also a bit of an old bore in a storytelling landscape defined by the likes of Game of Thrones.

It doesn't help that Aidan Turner, last seen as the manly, smouldering etc dwarf Kili in The Hobbit trilogy, appears to be an actor of very limited range, one that runs from smiling prettily in the happy scenes to furrowing his brow and clenching his jaw in the unhappy ones.

However, the main difficulty is that the first episode of Poldark was a story that was just a lot of hoary Mills & Boon cliches all rolled into one pretty package.

Aidan Turner plays the title role in the 2015 BBC remake of popular 70s TV series Poldark.

The story goes like this: the year is 1784 and young Poldark, a British officer wounded in the American War of Independence, returns home to find his father dead, his father's dilapidated servants and a bunch of dilapidated chickens living in his father's dilapidated house, his father's two tin mines spent and a bank balance deep in the red. To make matters worse his lovely but possibly rather thick girlfriend Elizabeth, who he was supposed to marry, has, thinking him dead in the Americas, agreed to wed his dull cousin Francis. Ross returns from the dead just in time for the nuptials, leading to Francis' father offering a large bribe to Ross to clear off to London and leave the happy couple alone, a bribe being a good idea given Ross's parlous financial situation.

Meanwhile, Poldark, who left for war with a reputation as a degenerate and a gambler, proves himself a reformed hero by stopping an awful dogfight on market day and saving a young serving wench who has run away from home and her abusive father. The father, all bad teeth and scarred knuckles, later arrives with his burly sons to claim her back, but not before the serving wench has miraculously turned into a goodlooking redhead. Phwoah! Then, against the odds, Poldark and his dilapidated servants and his yokel tenant farmers win the day in a fight with the wench's family, and young Ross decides, damn it, he's going to stay in lovely scenic Cornwall after all. Hooray!

To say that Poldark makes that other great British costume drama Downton Abbey look like Shakespeare, is an understatement almost as vast as the emptiness at the storytelling heart of all this. But who cares when he's got such lovely hair ...

- TimeOut