A prominent television screenwriter has criticised the creators of Poldark for portraying nonconsensual sex as “acceptable” and said a scene where the programme’s hero forces himself on a former lover is “rape, clear and simple”.
Bafta-nominated TV writer Lisa Holdsworth, whose credits include Emmerdale, Midsomer Murders and New Tricks, described the moment in Sunday’s episode where Ross Poldark ignores the repeated cries of “no” from Elizabeth, throws her down on the bed and pins her down before having sex with her, as “extremely problematic”.
The scene was described by the show’s producer as “consensual” but Holdsworth disagreed. “By modern standards, that is a rape, clear and simple,” she said. “I just think in the current climate it’s not really acceptable – it wasn’t quite a Trumpian pussy-grab but it was still uncomfortable, because you weren’t supposed to think any less of Ross Poldark at the end of that scene.
“You’re supposed to understand and think: ‘Oh well, she was asking for it,’ and that’s the problem, because it’s the same thing you hear applied to women every day and often in even more unpleasant circumstances. And that’s the major problem here – the person who did this is supposed to be the hero of the piece and there will be no comeuppance for him forcing himself on her. That’s extremely problematic.”
Holdsworth’s comments echoed those of several sexual violence charities, who said that the scene clearly depicted rape and damagingly perpetuated misconceptions around sexual consent. The BBC received 17 complaints about the scene and seven people also complained to OfCom.
But Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield said that in the original Poldark books, written by Winston Graham, the scene was left up to the reader’s imaginations. They consulted with Graham’s son Andrew, who described the moment as “consensual sex born of long-term love and longing”.
Horsfield added: “What you saw onscreen is consistent with what we believe those intentions to have been.”
However, Holdsworth said if Horsfield had intended on the encounter being consensual, she should have “made it clear that from the minute Elizabeth throws open the door that she wanted him there”.
“What I am left asking myself is why did she [Horsfield] write it like that?” she said. “Elizabeth makes it clear she doesn’t want him there, she tells him not to come into the room. Her line, ‘You wouldn’t dare’ could be seen as a provocation, and the whole context of it is that she provoked him into it, she sent a letter that wound him up.
“But that’s very dangerous territory to get into, the idea that a woman will drive a man to a point where he can’t control his baser instincts. That’s an argument we’re hearing in more modern cases and it doesn’t wash. So, in a modern context, it’s rape, cut and dried.”
For Holdworth, the programme’s ambiguous approach to sexual consent was indicative of a wider problem in UK television, and particularly in period dramas, where violence against women is seen as the norm.
She said: “It speaks to a bigger problem on British television that we’re obsessed with period TV, because it sells incredibly well but women rarely come out of it well, and it is usually told from a very male perspective. It’s problematic and we have to start looking at this stuff and say: ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if the sexual agency could lie with the woman’?”
