"Rosamunde Pilcher?" The guy behind the bar gives me a blank look with a hint of social fear: should he know the name? He shouldn't worry. Rosamunde Pilcher was born in 1924, barely 10 miles down the road from The Gurnard's Head, a cosy pub in the village of Lelant, in Cornwall's storm-battered, rugged west. After marrying in 1946 she left for Scotland, where she went on to become a writer. Pilcher never came back to live in Cornwall, but many of her stories are set in the rough landscape of her childhood home.
Now, aged 89, she has sold more than 60m books and has a fortune thought to exceed £100m. Her international breakthrough came late, in 1987, when The Shell Seekers entered the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for 48 weeks. Although Pilcher continued to write prolifically, none of her novels and stories since has matched the huge success of that one. She still leads – as family and friends are keen to stress – a very regular life near Dundee, untroubled by a public largely unaware of her work. In the UK, that is.
In Germany, it is a different story. Pilcher is a household name, not because of its German ring nor the 15m sales of her books – but because for 20 years she has been a firm fixture in the TV schedules. In Germany, Sunday night is Rosamunde Pilcher night: around six million people in Munich and Berlin, in Heidelberg and Hamburg, tune in to one of her dramas. Public broadcaster ZDF aired its first Pilcher movie, The Day of the Storm, in 1993. More than eight million – 25% of viewers – watched it, and a further 111 films have followed, all similarly successful. The movies feature mostly German actors, but they're filmed on location in England, usually in Cornwall, and each show typically contains long stretches of scenic footage, fly-overs of the cliffs at Bedruthan steps or of sun-flooded moorland in the west.
"The directors film it so well," says Mark Pilcher, the only one of the author's four children to live in Cornwall. A 55-year-old cattle farmer, he is local enough to drink at The Gurnard's Head, and thinks that Pilcher mania "has moved on from people buying my mother's books to Cornwall actually selling them".
But why does the drama do so well in Germany? "Well, the stories are good. They appeal to what you call family viewing," says Rosamunde Pilcher, speaking to me on the phone from Dundee, much to the excitement of my own – German – grandmother. "And the photography in these movies is lovely, almost like a tourism advertisement."
Claus Beling was the editor at ZDF who came up with the idea of turning Pilcher's work into film. "I have always been fascinated by the Cornish landscape. Its lights and colours are very special," he says. "Pilcher is amazing in conjuring up pictures of that scenery."
He thinks the success of the series is down to a general German fascination for grand landscapes – and to a nostalgic longing for a more traditional world: "where a village is still a community in which everyone looks after one another".
Actor Alexander-Klaus Stecher shares this view. He has starred in 10 Pilcher films, playing variously a mean guy, a lover or a stable worker. "The concept of the series is not to hurt, under no circumstances," he says. Pilcher dramas come with a guaranteed happy ending.
The England of these German productions might seem idealised, but the impact of them locally is very real. Peter Prideaux-Brune is a retired barrister who owns a 16th-century stately home near Padstow, parts of which he rents out for filming. No fewer than 16 Pilcher films have been shot at Prideaux Place. It has been the home to one Lord Willoughby, transformed into a luxury hotel and converted into a gin distillery. An oval bedroom, decorated with delicate stucco and painted in soft green, has been nicknamed the Großmutter room – because that is where the grandmother always changes her will, tells the heir that he is illegitimate, or where she dies. In the movies, of course. "A house like this has to earn its living," says Prideaux-Brune.
The house, which overlooks a lush deer park with picturesque views, sees around 25,000 visitors a year. More than 40% of them come from Germany, many on a Pilcher bus tour. Prideaux-Brune, who likes to greet the first coach of the day in his dressing gown, employs six full-time German-speaking guides and five staff for the adjacent tea room. "The Germans just love their cream tea," he says. Among Prideaux-Brune's large collection of teddy bears in the hallway sit specimens sporting a German soccer jersey or an "I love Hamburg" shirt – evidence of well-informed tourists and eager Pilcher fans.
The coaches cramming the country streets have helped transform the Cornish tourism industry over the last 15 years. Tourism accounts for more than 20% of the county's GDP; one in four locals works in the sector. As a destination for seaside holidays, the area saw a severe downturn in the 1990s. "Since then, a lot of different niche markets have developed," explains Malcolm Bell, head of Visit Cornwall. "The impact of the movies is hard to quantify, but whenever a programme is on, we see the traffic spike on our website." German travel agents notice the same increase. Two-thirds of all foreign visitors who come to Cornwall are from Germany, Austria or Switzerland: almost a quarter of a million each year.
"The Germans come to Cornwall thinking it is gloriously sunny here all the time, due to the movies. We occasionally have to explain that one of the reasons Cornwall is so beautiful is because it rains," says James Molesworth-St Aubyn. I have come to see him and his mother, Lady Iona, at their 50-room family residence, Pencarrow House, five miles north of Bodmin. After removing his muddied Wellingtons, James gives me a tour of the Georgian mansion, which in the 2011 Pilcher film English Wine served as Benson Valley Winery.
The kitchen of Pencarrow looks out on to beautifully groomed gardens. Lady Iona tells of an incident when the ceiling in the dining room came down and covered everything in white dust, just before a group of 160 Germans was expected for a tour. The visitors had actually quite liked it, Molesworth-St Aubyn says. "Because it shows that it is not all perfect." Not like in the Pilcher movies. More and more German Pilcher pilgrims come in their own cars rather than in coaches, observes Lady Iona. Which is good news for the county, because even though foreign tourists on average stay twice as long and spend twice as much money as British visitors, the economic effect of the coach groups remains limited. "It is a very convenient way to get a first taste of it," says Bell. "But we hope they come back individually." Just like the lost sons and daughters in the Sunday night movies.
