‘It's a Wild Country. Wild … Passionate … Strange’: Poldark and the Place-Image of Cornwall

Abstract

The BBC television adaptations of Winston Graham's Poldark novels (1975, 1977) were an enormous popular success, drawing large Sunday evening audiences and much coverage in the popular press. The series remains close to the hearts of its viewers, prompting relocations to ‘wild, romantic’ Cornwall in the south-west of England, where the novels and television series were set and filmed, and even Poldark-themed weddings. Poldark has also been used in the county's tourist marketing and it is this question, of the television series’ relationship to the ‘place-image’ of Cornwall, which I explore here. Part of a wider project exploring the cultural construction of Cornwall in film, television, art and literature, this article considers Poldark’s audio-visual production of ‘Cornwall’, looking particularly at the significance of the textuality of the serial broadcast television programme in producing ‘place-image’ for television viewers. Considering the rhetorical connections between the programme's aesthetics, the work of artists painting around Newlyn in the late nineteenth century and John Urry's notion of the ‘tourist gaze’, I argue that Poldark can be understood as having played a significant role in the construction of Cornwall's ‘place-image’ in the national and international imagination.