By Eleanor Sharples For The Daily Mail
Published: 00:00 BST, 13 June 2019 | Updated: 00:00 BST, 13 June 2019
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It is a Sunday night TV drama series with a hunky male lead. So of course we don’t have to wait long until his tanned and toned torso is paraded at the slightest excuse.
Clearly inspired by Aidan Turner’s muscular physique in the BBC’s Poldark, Tom Bateman strips off in the first ten minutes of ITV’s Beecham House. Bateman, 30, plays rugged former soldier John Beecham in the six-part period drama, set in India at the end of the 18th century.
But the actor who is engaged to Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley, 27, insists he does not want to be seen as a Poldark-style pin-up and says there was a ‘practical reason’ for the bare-chested scenes.
Torso time: Tom Bateman in the first episode of Beecham House on ITV
Clearly inspired by Aidan Turner’s (pictured) muscular physique in the BBC’s Poldark, Tom Bateman strips off in the first ten minutes of ITV’s Beecham House
Viewers first see him shirtless as his character dreams in bed, then he is shown sweaty and topless hacking away at shrubs in a striking similarity to the scything scene that launched Turner’s reputation as a TV heartthrob in the first series of Poldark. Bateman said: ‘I knew what it was. I am not stupid, I knew
