Poldark’s resilience helped me turn round my business

I discovered the TV series Poldark about a year into a new business, an ill-fitting professional identity, and life in a new city. Having worked for others since dental school, I’d taken possession of a practice the year I turned 30.

The practice needed serious refurbishment. I bought it despite dire warnings that my plans for the building, and the way I wanted to treat patients, couldn’t keep a practice in the black. After months of frigid rooms (the building barely had central heating) and frantic clinics, being constantly reminded I hadn’t yet accrued years of trust like the previous owner, I found myself in the upstairs office at 8pm on a Monday, weeping over a spreadsheet.

I approached Poldark with low expectations, seeking an old-fashioned escapist release. I could retreat into romantic landscapes, candlelit longing, or stakes much higher than any I’d taken on: shipwrecks, deadly outbreaks (when those were still the stuff of fiction), injustice and heartbreak. Debbie Horsfield’s glowing 2015 adaptation of the novels turned the melodrama dials high enough to engage a frazzled end-of-day brain which couldn’t grasp a plot for much longer than 20 minutes.

At first, it didn’t disappoint on the escapism front: operatic passions, shimmering violins, tumbling curls and terrible choices abounded. But later, and with no small sense of ridiculousness, I saw parallels to my business everywhere. In Ross Poldark’s stubborn refusal to accept defeat, reopening his family’s derelict copper mine and rebuilding his home despite a chorus advising him to walk away. I saw them in his cousin and rival Francis’s jaundiced self-pity, both men brought low by market forces. Rocks fall, mines flood and people falter, and even doing all you should can’t mitigate failure.

While Ross sublimated his regrets into sweaty labour, I poured my own into trying to be the most accommodating boss I could. Soon, “the mine” became my odd internal shorthand for the practice: for a recruitment rollercoaster, endless building work and countless small disasters. My academic and professional life (plus my middle-daughter status) trained me to expect that if I worked hard enough, the right outcomes would follow. The practice dismantled that idea with ruthless efficiency.

For someone who negotiates other people’s intimate boundaries and anxieties daily, I was shockingly unprepared for how visceral the reality felt. I was still less prepared for rage. Worse, I felt being a good boss and good dentist meant I should never burden those around me with my frustration and fear. This backfired more than once, making me seem remote to my colleagues. Others felt distance when they needed humanity.

The roiling Cornwall seas took on a weird, hallucinatory quality while my life contracted to nothing but equipment woes, shortages and tense payroll cycles. Peak unreality hit during a hellish period of several staff changes in succession, with costs mounting, waiting lists expanding despite more hours and every reason to believe all of it was a horrible mistake.

Then came the moments I couldn’t muscle through: a missed target with serious financial consequences; a bruising clash that, in retrospect, was my own fault. It wasn’t quite Poldark (no one almost drowned!). Nor was it the catastrophe I feared, but the beginning of learning how to be boss without tamping down every human feeling.

Though the worries around what I “should” have been doing didn’t vanish, the practice survived: one day, one patient, one system and one decision at a time. Still, I needed help. That came through someone who grew into an extraordinary business manager, co-conspirator and friend. Paring back my hours, not having my fingerprints on every single process, and letting people see me, helped the practice grow beyond survival.

As the 10th anniversary of the practice approached, and in a perverse fit of nostalgia, I decided to rewatch Poldark. While wonderful, it didn’t hold quite the same charge, for reasons besides Aidan Turner’s (very lovely) bare chest. Back then, it was more about claiming the uglier feelings, accepting that hard work can’t fix everything and that sometimes, the mine just floods.