Forget the Downton girls! This was the golden age of the heaving bosom
As two giants of costume drama take their final bow ...
SHE was the most fiery, jealous and bewitching heroine ever portrayed on television. He was the incorruptible hero, a stereotype of the patriotic public schoolboy. Their legacy is enjoyed by millions. Angharad Rees and Simon Ward, whose deaths were both announced over the weekend, helped transform costume drama into a national obsession. They were part of a golden generation of British actors who played characters that embodied a passionate idealism. The heart of their appeal seems too naive to be possible now — they stood for love, honour, self-sacrifice and bravery.
Things are rather different now. We are more addicted to costume drama than ever, but it’s the glorious cynicism of the Borgias and the snobbery of Downton that we want now — not the insane romance of Poldark and Young Winston.
Poldark, the saga of a tin-mining family in Cornwall during the Napoleonic era, was a full-blooded bodice-ripper. its smouldering, scar-faced hero, played by Robin Ellis, made the show especially popular with women viewers during its two-season run from 1975 to 1977.
But it was Angharad Rees as the serving-girl Demelza who stole the nation’s heart. A blue-eyed redhead with a piratical smile and a violent temper, in the series she doesn’t try to hide her passion for the master, Ross Poldark — or her ambitions to bed him and make herself one of the gentry.
When he first sees her, Poldark mistakes her for a boy: she has cropped hair and she’s being thrashed within an inch of her life by a baker for stealing a pie in Redruth market.
Demelza has no shame. She takes one look at Captain Poldark’s sideburns and britches, and though this isn’t her usual line of work, she offers to ‘take ’em off’ for a shilling.
Poldark, who intends to rescue her from a life of crime, replies that he simply wants to take her back to his house and give her somewhere decent to sleep.
‘ in that case,’ retorts Demelza, unabashed, ‘it’ll be two shillings!’ The wealthy man, the untamed firebrand of a girl, master and servant, a flogging: here are all the ingredients of this year’s erotic bestseller Fifty Shades Of Grey.
No wonder, in a Britain of industrial unrest and economic turmoil under then prime minister Harold Wilson, this was unmissable viewing.
Poldark drew audiences of 15 million and, in the days before DVD boxsets, the repeats were watched just as avidly.
THE cast was terrific: Ellis was tortured and brooding, Ralph Bates as his scheming enemy was lizardly, and Jill Townsend was sweetly vulnerable. But the intensity of Angharad Rees’s performance burned the rest off the screen.
She could be coquettish, demure, ferocious, devious, childish, wise, mocking, bewildered and impossible, all within the space of a scene.
And she was a feminist: ‘ A woman’s got no rights, no nothing!’ she rages at Poldark. ‘ Men, you’re all the same when you come to it — you stink together!’
The series set new standards in location filming. Costume drama had too often been studio bound and theatrical — even Seventies ratings-busters with huge budgets and high production values, such as i, Claudius, look stagey and Shakespearean now, as if they had been shot in the National Theatre.
Poldark broke the mould: it made much of the broiling Cornish seas, the windswept moorlands, the lonely mansions and lowering cloudscapes. it was as if nothing smaller could contain Angharad Rees’s passions.
Simon Ward was quite different: buttoned up, bursting with emotion that he somehow kept contained.
He also looked impossibly youthful — in 1972’s Young Winston, when he was 30, he played the future prime minister Churchill as a 13-year-old in his first scenes. Seven years later, in Zulu Dawn, he was still hopelessly young, as the tender lieutenant who can’t stomach the sight of blood.
Ward’s particular appeal lay in his ability to seem old-fashioned on screen. it made him ideal for the lead role in the 1975 television film All Creatures Great And Small, as the inexperienced vet James Herriot struggling to be accepted by the farmers of the Yorkshire Dales between the wars.
it was easy to believe that he knew how to deliver a calf in a wet barn at 3am on a Sunday morning, but that he’d be too shy to speak to the farmer’s pretty daughter.
But when he appeared in big budget costume dramas, a swashbuckling zest also came to the fore. it suited adventures such as The Three Musketeers (1973), all swords and chivalry amid the French Revolution, with hellraiser Oliver Reed and Hollywood pin-up Raquel Welch. Three years later, in 1976, he was a World War i fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps in Aces High. it was for his role as the youthful Churchill that he is best known, though — aristocratic, reckless, rebellious, egotistical and bold, exactly as we want our greatest wartime leader to be.
Ward achieves a brilliant balancing act: we love to see young Winston being irresponsible and harum-scarum, but we need him to be good and honest at heart. And as he surveys his ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, with a combination of pride and devilry, we believe he is exactly that.
in the decade that followed the film’s success, in the real world, that England of innocence was tarnished by strikes, blackouts, rampant unemployment and a winter of discontent that saw mountains of rubbish on the streets. This was a country divided, and costume drama reflected that. Jeremy irons and Anthony Andrews took an English country estate as their playground in Brideshead Revisited, in 1981, but there was nothing noble about their aristocracy. The world they inhabited was shabby and decaying.
As Ward aged and his juvenile looks faded too, he was able to adapt his acting to fit the new mood. He was Bishop Gardiner in the recent TV series The Tudors, playing the cleric as a reptilian sadist and a Roman Catholic fanatic.
However, he never quite shook off his connection to Churchill — in 1994 he even played the great statesman in a Turkish epic about the wars for national independence.
ANGHARAD Rees, meanwhile, began a new career. She founded a jewellery business, based in Knightsbridge, which drew for inspiration on traditional designs from around the world — strings of Venetian beads, Masai bangles and gold-laced glass.
She earned a reputation as one of the best designers of costume jewellery — what else, for the star of such a seminal costume drama?
The rollercoaster storylines, vibrant characters and breathtaking set-pieces of historical mini-series will always grip TV audiences. But with so many channels competing with the internet, they will never again be quite the vast national spectacles that held half the population hypnotised.
Perhaps it is as well that Simon Ward and Angharad Rees lived when they did. Today’s world is too small for them.