Once upon a time, a costume drama was a gentle, clean, beautiful thing; the sort of thing you could watch at Sunday teatime with your mum because it had lots of soft lighting where all the storylines should be.
Not any more. Wolf Hall might have hinted at a change in tastes, and Jamaica Inn was notable for being nonchalant about audibility but this week’s two big BBC period dramas are doing their best to cement it. Thursday night’s Banished and Sunday night’s Poldark are actively rewriting the visual grammar of the costume drama as we know it. They’re darker and grimier than what came before. They’re more naturalistic. They’re mumblecore, basically.
So it seems only natural that we should mark the advent of this bold new era of storytelling with a cheeky game of New Costume Drama Bingo. Tick each of these events off as they happen during Banished and Poldark. Extra points if you recognise actors from Game of Thrones. If you fill your card, it means we have a stone-cold zeitgeist on our hands.
