Fancy that

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[/audioplayer]Stand by your remotes, girls: the second series of Poldark is under way. Filming has started — yes, he’s out there somewhere, wearing those trousers, not wearing that shirt, swinging that scythe. You’ve only got to wait for someone to edit it all together and then Sunday nights can be special again. You’ll be able to gaze and sigh and imagine. Us blokes, meanwhile, will be considering an anomaly: why is that women can express lust without sounding seedy, but men can’t?

I didn’t watch the first series. About three weeks in, when the Twitter drums had really started beating, I asked a female friend if it was that good. ‘He’s good,’ Catherine replied, so quickly and insistently that she might as well have just said ‘phwoar!’ Later I told my partner what had happened. ‘He is good,’ said Jo, with an excited shiver.

‘Hang on,’ I protested. ‘If I said I fancied a woman on the telly, you’d go spare.’

She denied it, but we both knew this was at least partly untrue: Jo wouldn’t go spare, but she would point out that I sounded like a dirty old man. For a while I mused on the injustice of this. How come Jo was allowed to lust after Aidan Turner and I was expected to laugh about it (which I did — there was something very funny about her response, as there had been about Catherine’s), but were I to convey my keen physical admiration of an actress the conversation would get closed down pretty smartish? (See — I’m not even naming a particular actress. I wouldn’t want the grief next time she was on TV.)

After a bit of thought, however, I realised there was no injustice.