It is the kind of revelation that could make you look at Ross Poldark completely differently. That might even make you question why you’ve been tuning in to watch him scythe some Cornish hay fields in a state of undress. Because apparently, when it comes to mowing meadows, the brooding star of Sunday night telly is proving a massive disappointment.
“There was a lot of sweating and grunting going on but the only time you’d mow like that would be in a competition,” expert scyther Chris Riley told the Telegraph. “Scything is an efficient and poetic way of cutting rather than the way it was portrayed on Poldark, where it was this very aggressive, manly action.”
Well that’s Poldark ruined, then. God only knows what we do with all the pictures the BBC happened to release of him standing topless in a field preparing to mow, now that we know he’s officially useless with a scythe. But it’s not as if Ross is alone among dramatic characters in being surprisingly rubbish at what he does. Television has more than a sprinkling of people who can’t actually do their jobs:
DI Alec Hardy
Broadchurch is not short of characters who seem a bit rubbish at their jobs – none of the lawyers came out of the last series exactly covered in glory – and it is television law that detectives must be flawed, but Hardy often looks like the policeman you’d least like to investigate anything. All those procedural mistakes at trial. Working through a heart problem that caused him to collapse. Not noticing for ages that it was his partner’s husband who had done the murdering, even when he went round for tea … and that’s before we get to his terrible stint as a training officer, in which he seemed determined to bore his audiences into leaving the force before they’d even really joined.
Daenerys Targaryen
The problem with having dragons as your special power is that you need to be able to control them. And in Game of Thrones, Daenerys, Mother of Dragons, appears to be struggling with that essential element of dragon training – her increasingly grown-up children are rather too interested in roasting goats and children for their dinner and not at all impressed by her attempts to send them to their room. Never mind that she hatched them from petrified eggs on her husband’s funeral pyre, Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion increasingly seem to call the shots.
DSI Stella Gibson
It took a whole second series of The Fall for the icy DSI Gibson to finally capture Paul Spector, often due more to the writers’ determination to allow the complex killer to stay at large, than mistakes on her part. But not noticing the murderer you’ve been stalking is hiding in your own wardrobe and reading your dream diary? Come on! What kind of detective are you?
Siobhan Sharpe
So here’s the thing: W1A’s Siobhan Sharpe is the world’s worst public relations professional – and admittedly written as such by John Morton. But not to acknowledge her work as the head of Perfect Curve would be to ignore the brilliant BBC rebranding exercise catastrophic Wingategate PR support, and her thoughts on whether “actually going backwards” could be the future. Also worth noting: her Jubilympics idea did actually become a thing.
