Skip to main content

Main menu

  • HOME
  • ONLINE FIRST
  • CURRENT ISSUE
  • ALL ISSUES
  • AUTHORS & REVIEWERS
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • BJGP LIFE
  • MORE
    • About BJGP
    • Conference
    • Advertising
    • eLetters
    • Alerts
    • Video
    • Audio
    • Librarian information
    • Resilience
    • COVID-19 Clinical Solutions
  • RCGP
    • BJGP for RCGP members
    • BJGP Open
    • RCGP eLearning
    • InnovAIT Journal
    • Jobs and careers

User menu

  • Subscriptions
  • Alerts
  • Log in

Search

  • Advanced search
British Journal of General Practice
Intended for Healthcare Professionals
  • RCGP
    • BJGP for RCGP members
    • BJGP Open
    • RCGP eLearning
    • InnovAIT Journal
    • Jobs and careers
  • Subscriptions
  • Alerts
  • Log in
  • Follow bjgp on Twitter
  • Visit bjgp on Facebook
  • Blog
  • Listen to BJGP podcast
  • Subscribe BJGP on YouTube
British Journal of General Practice
Intended for Healthcare Professionals

Advanced Search

  • HOME
  • ONLINE FIRST
  • CURRENT ISSUE
  • ALL ISSUES
  • AUTHORS & REVIEWERS
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • BJGP LIFE
  • MORE
    • About BJGP
    • Conference
    • Advertising
    • eLetters
    • Alerts
    • Video
    • Audio
    • Librarian information
    • Resilience
    • COVID-19 Clinical Solutions
Life & Times

Grief, hallucinations, and Poldark: an interview with Jack Farthing

Roger Jones
British Journal of General Practice 2019; 69 (686): 448. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp19X705317
Roger Jones
.
Roles: Editor
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Article
  • Figures & Data
  • Info
  • eLetters
  • PDF
Loading

Jack Farthing plays George Warleggan in Poldark. Aficionados of Winston Graham’s rollicking adventure series, set in Cornwall at the turn of the century — 18th that is — will need no explanation, but the uninitiated need to know that George is Captain Ross Poldark’s nemesis in love, business, and politics, a banker and an all-round bad egg. At the end of the last series, when it began to look as though George might have it all, his wife Elizabeth died, shockingly, from puerperal sepsis. As you may have seen, in the early episodes of the current, and final, series of Poldark, George descended into and, eventually, emerged from the depths of grief.

GRIEF

Initial denial was followed by episodes of hallucinations accompanied by thoughts of self-destruction. Warleggan initially suppressed his grief, ordering portraits of Elizabeth to be taken down and forbidding any mention of her. No doubt encouraged by his even less likeable uncle Cary Warleggan, George threw himself back into work, and it was only after an encounter with his son Valentine that his buried emotions burst to the surface and he began to have increasingly intense and prolonged hallucinations of his dead wife. He sees her in the servant girl at the bank when she comes to his desk, glimpses her in the rooms of their country house, Trenwith, and eventually finds himself sitting with her in conversation.

DELUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS

I talked to Jack Farthing, whose previous roles have included a young man with terminal pancreatic cancer in Burn Burn Burn, and the Hon. Freddie Threepwood in Blandings, in Café Caritas at the RCGP. He is charming, thoughtful, and self-effacing — nothing like George Warleggan. In approaching this challenging role he was determined to do justice to the realities of complicated bereavement, and we discussed his approach to the work and the information that he discovered and used to add authenticity and accuracy to the drama. He obtained advice and information from two psychiatrists and a researcher looking specifically at complicated grief. He was surprised, as was I, at the reported frequency of delusions and hallucinations of the deceased spouse, with up to 80% of bereaved older people reporting these events following bereavement.1 The bereaved themselves feel that they may be losing their minds, and need reassurance that this can be a normal part of the grief reaction.

Figure

Jack Farthing as George Warleggan. Credit: BBC.

TALK THERAPY

Jack was particularly interested in the two polar opposite 19th-century approaches to treatment. The dreadful Dr Penrose, engaged by uncle Cary, considered George to be possessed by animal spirits and subjected him to bleeding, blistering, cupping, sedation, restraint, and iced baths. George ended up wandering the Cornish countryside in his nightshirt and came close to suicide. He was saved by the wise and gentle Dr Dwight Enys, who has already graced the pages of the BJGP,2 and whose compassionate ‘talk therapy’ — 19th-century CBT — enabled George to gradually recover his normal self. Enys’s therapeutic approach involved taking Warleggan to his wife’s grave, and into the bedroom where she died. His ‘no locked doors’ policy has echoes of radical liberal approaches to the care of psychotic patients in the 1970s. His therapeutic success with George Warleggan, along with his outspoken views about criminality and mental illness, gave this quiet country doctor a national reputation, and he was later called on to advise on the madness of King George III.

One particular acting challenge was to present a sufficiently nuanced account of these complex events, in the context and constraints of fast-paced modern-day moviemaking, where time is of the essence.

I was impressed and moved by the care in which Jack had approached his work, recognising the potential that popular TV has for both good and harm. We will be seeing a lot more of him: Official Secrets premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is released this October, and Poldark series 5 returned to our screens on the BBC in July.

  • © British Journal of General Practice 2019

REFERENCES

  1. 1.↵
    1. Badcock JC,
    2. Dewon J,
    3. Larøi F
    (2017) Hallucinations in healthy older adults: an overview of the literature and perspectives for future research. Front Psychol 8:1134.
    OpenUrl
  2. 2.↵
    1. Jones R
    (2018) Br J Gen Pract, Medication, medication. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp18X698909.
Back to top
Previous ArticleNext Article

In this issue

British Journal of General Practice: 69 (686)
British Journal of General Practice
Vol. 69, Issue 686
September 2019
  • Table of Contents
  • Index by author
Download PDF
Download PowerPoint
Article Alerts
Or,
sign in or create an account with your email address
Email Article

Thank you for recommending British Journal of General Practice.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person to whom you are recommending the page knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Grief, hallucinations, and Poldark: an interview with Jack Farthing
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from British Journal of General Practice
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from British Journal of General Practice.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Citation Tools
Grief, hallucinations, and Poldark: an interview with Jack Farthing
Roger Jones
British Journal of General Practice 2019; 69 (686): 448. DOI: 10.3399/bjgp19X705317

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero

Share
Grief, hallucinations, and Poldark: an interview with Jack Farthing
Roger Jones
British Journal of General Practice 2019; 69 (686): 448. DOI: 10.3399/bjgp19X705317
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One
  • Mendeley logo Mendeley

Jump to section

  • Top
  • Article
    • GRIEF
    • DELUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS
    • TALK THERAPY
    • REFERENCES
  • Figures & Data
  • Info
  • eLetters
  • PDF

More in this TOC Section

  • It’s The Sun Wot Won It
  • The WHO’s definition of health: a baby to be retrieved from the bathwater?
  • Books: The Only Book I’ll Ever Write: When The Doctor Becomes The Patient
Show more Life & Times

Related Articles

Cited By...

Intended for Healthcare Professionals

BJGP Life

BJGP Open

 

@BJGPjournal's Likes on Twitter

 
 

British Journal of General Practice

NAVIGATE

  • Home
  • Current Issue
  • All Issues
  • Online First
  • Authors & reviewers

RCGP

  • BJGP for RCGP members
  • BJGP Open
  • RCGP eLearning
  • InnovAiT Journal
  • Jobs and careers

MY ACCOUNT

  • RCGP members' login
  • Subscriber login
  • Activate subscription
  • Terms and conditions

NEWS AND UPDATES

  • About BJGP
  • Alerts
  • RSS feeds
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

AUTHORS & REVIEWERS

  • Submit an article
  • Writing for BJGP: research
  • Writing for BJGP: other sections
  • BJGP editorial process & policies
  • BJGP ethical guidelines
  • Peer review for BJGP

CUSTOMER SERVICES

  • Advertising
  • Contact subscription agent
  • Copyright
  • Librarian information

CONTRIBUTE

  • BJGP Life
  • eLetters
  • Feedback

CONTACT US

BJGP Journal Office
RCGP
30 Euston Square
London NW1 2FB
Tel: +44 (0)20 3188 7400
Email: journal@rcgp.org.uk

British Journal of General Practice is an editorially-independent publication of the Royal College of General Practitioners
© 2023 British Journal of General Practice

Print ISSN: 0960-1643
Online ISSN: 1478-5242