Has there ever
been a bigger single media “event,” I wonder, with the potential to trigger a
seismic shift in fortunes for Cornwall’s economy?
The earth may not
actually have moved – yet – but I think we could be forgiven for concluding
that something not far short of a metaphorical earthquake is now being
anticipated for our tourist industry this year.
I’m talking – as seemingly
everyone is at the moment – about Poldark,
in its spectacular reincarnation on our TV screens, with astronomical
publicity before and after.
So far as
Cornwall was concerned, it ticked just about every conceivable box – capped by
out-of-this-world photography magnificently exploiting our stunning coastal
scenery.
“The A30 may need
widening to accommodate the deluge of visitors,” wrote Daily Telegraph TV critic Jasper Rees.
Alas, remembering
that he IS a “critic,” he sourly anticipated “seven further episodes of perfectly vacuous entertainment”
and signed off by describing the whole thing as “pretty but without a thought
in its head.”
Ah well, he
probably felt better for writing that – and it certainly won’t have worried
anyone involved in our tourist industry.
Malcolm Bell,
head of tourism at Visit Cornwall, was
on BBC Radio Cornwall this morning
gleefully totting up the equivalent free advertising value – something like £3
or £4 millions-worth, I think he said.
The real-time viewing
figures came out at a whopping near-7 million, smashing Mr Selfridge out of sight (well,
almost – but the latter IS starting to struggle a bit, isn’t it?).
And the earth –
as I hinted just now – might yet move.
Victoria Lambert, in today’s Telegraph,
almost suggests as much with this gem:--
“Ross Poldark . . . is so smouldering and so, quite
frankly, sexy that I expect to hear reports of spontaneous combustion imminently
among the vast numbers of female viewers who were hooked on the first episode.”
In the meantime,
the programme has surely put Wycliffe, Doc Martin, The Onedin Line et al in the
shade as a Heaven-sent mega-boost for Cornish tourism (and yes, you could even
hear what the characters were saying, if some of the accents were a bit wonky).
So now the stage
is set for that bumper year for our holdiday industry, which in turn can
hopefully be the foundation for a sustained, longer-term era of prosperity.
But, as that disheveled,
chain-smoking TV detective Columbo
used to say, “there’s just one thing bothering me . . . “
In a previous
life, I publicised numerous hotels and visitor attractions for many years, and I
recall regular frustration at the way the good weather would never come in the “right
years.”
That is, there
would be a serious downturn in visitor numbers on the back of several poor
summers. Then – and this really was
quite a regular pattern - we would have two successive hot and sunny ones,
enough to persuade all those “lost” visitors to give Cornwall another
chance.
But then, of
course, just as they were all heading back west of the Tamar once more, that
third summer would be an awful one, putting everyone off again. And so the frustrating cycle would continue.
You may recall that we’ve just had two lovely summers
in a row . . .
