- Series 4 ended at the end of Book 7 and there's a big time jump in between Book 7 and Book 8.
- He thought he'd finished the Poldarks, but, in fact, very recently, somebody had sent me a letter that my father had written in October 1980, just in the period when he was starting the next Poldark, The Stranger from the Sea.
And what he said was, "Well, now after 4 years, there are stirrings again.
If I do write another, I shall despair of ever stopping.
Until that chap up above says it's time to stop."
- [Interviewer] He really loved these characters in the books.
- He did, he did.
- [Debbie] In Book 8, Winston Graham references things that did happen in the gap.
And we are building our story around those.
- We only ever had one writer.
It's incredible, and I think that shows that continuity and consistency in the show.
That's something that's really apparent.
You know, we feel it as actors.
- My father would have been completely enamored by and taken with what Debbie's done with it.
- [Debbie] I tried to follow what Winston Graham's template has been, because, he tends to cover a couple of years in each book.
I did quite a lot of digging and research.
- In the time of the Poldarks, Cornwall was actually at the center of the Industrial Revolution.
- [Debbie] There's the American Revolution, there's the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, a kind of seething hotbed of intrigue and suspicion and you not knowing who you can trust.
- Although you've captured the historical detail, it's in there, absolutely fantastically.
- I actually just googled things like, spying 1800s.
(Laughs) All kinds of interesting characters came up.
- Winston Graham had started to use historical characters in the books.
Debbie ran with that.
Finding Despard, and Catherine, and Merceron, mixing them in with our fictional characters.
- Slave labor.
- We see how Ross and George are smaller fish in a bigger pond that corrupt machinations of politics and power.
- A lot of new themes to it that haven't really been in Poldark before.
- This year it does feel slightly different.
It does feel more exciting.
There's so much going on.
- The world outside Cornwall breaks in.
