Forget tripping the light fantastic - staying in on a Sunday night to watch telly with a boiled egg and soldiers on a tray is where it’s at.

The pleasure of Sunday night television has scaled new heights for me recently with the dramatisation of Poldark, Winston Graham’s gripping saga of love, loss, tin mining and leather breeches in late 18th Century Cornwall.

I’ll come clean and admit that along with most of the female population at the time, I had a huge adolescent crush on Robin Ellis, who played Ross Poldark in the celebrated 1970s’ adaptation - all frilly shirts undone to the waist, highly polished riding boots and dashing gallops across the windswept Cornish moors.

I remember devouring the novels and drooling over every episode, so much so that when the BBC announced last year it was planning a remake, I promptly rented as many episodes as lovefilm.com would let me (though its collection is incomplete).

Having seen many of the original programmes only recently, I can vouch there wasn’t much naked male flesh on display back in the 1970s (we had to wait for Colin Firth to go for a topless swim in Pride and Prejudice for that).

Yet already, in just three episodes, we have seen Ross (played brilliantly by a moody, smouldering Aidan Turner) bare his six-pack to till the soil, go skinny-dipping in the sea and (presumably) remove all his clothes to seduce the comely Demelza.

Reviews of the latest offering have been mixed (personally, I’m loving it) so it’s hard to remember back in the days of just three channels and no video recorders, viewing figures for the Sunday evening series were so high vicars up and down the country had to reschedule evensong or find themselves preaching to an empty church.

With this in mind, when it was revealed Ellis (now in his seventies) would be getting a cameo role in the new series, I was sure cheeky programme makers would cast him as the novels’ rogue clergyman and that clerical eyebrows would once again be raised.

So I was surprised last Sunday to see Ellis playing a magistrate deciding the fate of Jim Carter, a young miner being tried for poaching a few pheasants, but even so, the producers managed to have their little joke.

As the newly wed and asthmatic Carter stood in the dock with his employer Ross Poldark pleading for clemency, Ellis as judge, was ruthless; if Carter was well enough to go down a mine and father a child, he argued, he was well enough to take his punishment and go to jail.

As he delivered his verdict on poor Jim, Ellis looked not at the defendant, but at the outspoken Ross Poldark who dared question his authority in court and for one moment, I wondered if Ellis was also passing judgement on this latest series and in particular, on his handsome young successor to the role.

If I’d been on the jury, I wouldn’t have found Turner guilty of anything but tremendous talent and breathtakingly good looks.