Never knowingly understated

At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner) left off the brooding and cliff-top galloping for a while to review his finances. They were, his genial banker Harris Pascoe told him, in good shape. Hearing that Ross’s marriage was going through one of its happier phases too, Harris then turned even more reassuring. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ he concluded with a cheerful smile.

Which just goes to show that Harris Pascoe must never have seen Poldark — because the answer to his question was, of course, ‘Almost everything’. Ross’s wife Demelza could, for example, be summoned, along with her cleavage, to attend her estranged father who lay in bed dying — or ‘a-dying’ as she duly preferred to call it. Ross could also arrange a secret marriage between Caroline Penvenen and Dr Enys, only for both to be dramatically called away on their wedding night: she, to her beloved guardian who was doing some a-dying himself; he, to help Elizabeth Warleggan deliver a baby that we and Ross know is Ross’s rather than horrible husband George’s.

Ross’s initial response to the birth was essentially threefold. He downed a series of port shots, went sprinting along the coastline (presumably, in his anguish he’d forgotten his horse) and finally headed up to George’s place to spy through the windows. Luckily for us and our entertainment, he arrived just as Aunt Agatha was going into mad-old-crone overdrive.

The baby, you see, had been born on the night of a black moon, causing Agatha to cry, ‘’Tis a bad omen, mark my words!’ (If you wanted to turn Poldark into a drinking game with some port shots of your own, I’d recommend taking a slug every time a sentence begins with ‘’Tis’ — as well as whenever anyone uses ‘be’ instead of ‘is’, or reverses normal word order.)