There was a news story the other day about how a shortage of women on the Faroe Islands has led to men importing wives from Thailand. Jamestown (Sky1) is centred around the same sort of idea, only four centuries earlier: the men are British colonists in Virginia sending for wives from the old country. An early version of mail-order or internet brides.
It was a riskier business back then, without Skype and with a hazardous Atlantic crossing. Some women didn’t arrive at all, and the ones who did didn’t always get what they wanted or expected.
Ambitious Jocelyn (Naomi Battrick) met Samuel back at home so has some idea what she has let herself in for. Alice (Sophie Rundle) thinks she has struck gold when she’s met off the boat by a kind, tousled beefcake named Silas – but it turns out he’s just picking her up for his older brother, Henry (Max Beesley), who’s an altogether more sinister proposition: a brute and a rapist. As for Verity (Niamh Walsh), the first sight she gets of her future husband is him having his ear nailed to a post. He’s the town drunk.
Jamestown is a rough outpost where rivalries, resentment, greed and jealousy mix with the dirt and the shadow of the gallows looms over everything. Beyond the wooden barricade and the new tobacco plantations lies the unknown – forests, wolves, Native Americans and maybe gold too.
It’s certainly a goldmine from a storyteller’s point of view. There are all sorts of horrors here – the birth of the British empire and of modern America, war and slavery just round the corner. It’s an almost endless seam of stories, and the three recent arrivals, each with their own horrors and journeys, are a good route in.
Jamestown is made by the people who made Downton Abbey, and though the setting is very different, it has a few things in common: sumptuousness, open-ended narrative, the odd curveball. It’s more fun than high culture or history lessons. An expensive soap, in other words.
Henry’s dead! After an explosive accident upriver. Now Alice can fall into Silas’s strong arms and settle … only Henry’s not dead! He survived the explosion, just. Will he make it back to town though? And will Silas’s handsome head will be the first in that noose?
