Poldark could return in later years with Ross “in his 40s”

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Writer Debbie Horsfield and producer Karen Thrussell are open to one day adapting the later books in Winston Graham’s saga after this year’s fifth and ‘final’ series.

The fifth series of Poldark airing in the summer of 2019 will be the last – or will it?

Having called time on Aidan Turner’s brooding hero for now, writer Debbie Horsfield and producer Karen Thrussell revealed at the Radio Times Covers Party that the forthcoming new series may not be fans’ final visit to Cornwall and its warring Poldark and Warleggan clans.

Series four of the BBC1 period drama covered the events of The Angry Tide, book seven in Poldark novelist Winston Graham’s saga. Book eight, The Stranger from the Sea, begins in 1810 – a leap of more than ten years from the end of the previous novel – and picks up on the lives of the grown-up Poldark and Warleggan children.

Series creator Horsfield, however, is keen to continue following the stories of Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson’s central characters Ross and Demelza Poldark, so series five will instead focus on the period between books seven and eight only hinted at by Graham.

Producer Thrussell said last September that season five “will be the last series in the Poldark chronicle… for now”, but after The Stranger from the Sea there are four more books to delight fans, all featuring Ross and Demelza but which have not yet been adapted for television.

So could Horsfield and Thrussell be open to one day starting on the final books and making a sixth series of Poldark?

It seems the answer is yes – but after a break of some years for both Ross Poldark and his viewing public.

“There are five more books we could do in future possibly,” said Thrussell. “If we did a Poldark six – and a lot of us would like to do it – it wouldn’t be for a few years yet.

“Ross would be in his 40s… [and] I think we would probably focus on Ross and Demelza because we love them so much. The books are really great. I think for me, it would be a real honour to finish them because the 1970s series didn’t finish them, they stopped where we are stopping now. And as a reader of the books… [who] loves the books… I would love to get to the end.”

Writer Horsfield struck a slightly more cautious note, insisting that no formal conversations had taken place between the BBC and the show’s producers Mammoth Screen. But she said that viewers should not rule out a return to Cornwall sometime in the future.

“I would never say never,” she said. “We have had such an amazing time on this, so who knows?”

Poldark series 5 is due to air on BBC1 later this year