Debbie Horsfield writes busy family and workplace dramas, and gives Poldark a conscience to complicate its romance. We like her brisk storytelling, but the care she takes with her leading man makes the thinly written bankers harder to forgive.
Fi1m perspective
Ross Poldark is worth watching when his conscience gets in the way of what he wants. That is the useful complication Debbie Horsfield brings to Poldark (2015), her adaptation of Winston Graham's novels. We found ourselves caught up in the romance because Ross had something harder to consider than whom he found attractive. Aidan Turner plays him with enough conviction to make the polished surfaces worth forgiving. The series is sometimes too pleased with its handsome hero, but Horsfield gives him more to do than look troubled against the Cornish coast.
Before the costume drama came contemporary northern workplaces and families. Making Out (1989) was a factory-based drama; Cutting It (2002) built a family saga around a hairdressing salon. Those settings put people together for reasons beyond attraction, and give their private difficulties somewhere practical to play out. It is a useful habit for a television writer: people have something else to be getting on with while their feelings become complicated.
Poldark was her first adaptation, undertaken after Karen Thrussell and Damien Timmer at Mammoth Screen approached her about the first two Graham novels. The series ran for five seasons, drawing on her ability to keep character journeys clear across a long story. Its briskness serves the romance well, leaving little sense that Horsfield feels obliged to apologise for it. More importantly, Ross's social conscience gives his personal choices weight beyond the question of attraction.
She is less patient with the bankers. Their broad characterisation tells us whom to distrust and makes the social tensions too simple. We would have liked them to receive some of the attention given to Ross, whose desires and responsibilities are allowed to pull him in different directions. The writing could spend longer on their reasons without losing the pace that makes the series inviting.
Age Before Beauty (2018) returned Horsfield to contemporary Manchester and salon family drama. Costume drama had not displaced her interest in the places where families work together. Start with Poldark for Turner and the busy romance, provided a fair hearing for the opposition is not essential to the evening.
Biography
Debbie Horsfield is an English theatre and television writer and producer. She was born in 1955 in Eccles, Greater Manchester, and studied English Language and Literature at Newcastle University. She began her career in theatre, working at the Royal Shakespeare Company and as resident writer at the Liverpool Playhouse, where she wrote the Red Devils Trilogy.
Horsfield transitioned to television in the 1980s, writing series including Making Out (1989–1991) and Cutting It (2002–2005). She is best known for adapting Winston Graham’s Poldark novels for the BBC, serving as creator and writer of the 2015 series and its subsequent seasons through 2019. She has also created and written Age Before Beauty (2018), Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale (2024) and The Forsytes (2025).
