The Jewel in the Crown - Watch Viooz TV Serie Online Download - Watch Viooz The Jewel in the Crown Drama The Jewel in the Crown is a British television serial about the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II, based upon the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott. Granada Television produced it for the ITV network. First Air Date: 1984-01-09 The Jewel in the Crown (TV Series 1984- ) — The Movie Database (TMDb) We don't have any reviews for The Jewel in the Crown. Recommendations We don't have enough data to suggest any TV shows based on The Jewel in the Crown. You can help by rating TV shows you've seen. URL By signing up for an account on TMDb, you can post directly to Twitter and Facebook. You need to be logged in to continue. Click here to login or here to sign up.

About: The Jewel in the Crown (TV series) About: The Jewel in the Crown (TV series) An Entity of Type : television show , from Named Graph : , within Data Space : dbpedia.org The Jewel in the Crown (1984) is a British television serial about the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II, based upon the Raj Quartet novels (1965–75) by British author Paul Scott. Granada Television produced the series for the ITV network. Property abstract The Jewel in the Crown (1984) is a British television serial about the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II, based upon the Raj Quartet novels (1965–75) by British author Paul Scott. Granada Television produced the series for the ITV network. (en) Le Joyau de la couronne (The Jewel in the Crown) est une mini-série britannique en un épisode de 120 minutes et 13 épisodes de 50 minutes, créée par Ken Taylor d'après l'œuvre de Paul Scott intitulée Le Quatuor indien, et diffusée entre le et le sur ITV.

En France, la mini-série a été diffusée à partir du 23 octobre 1987 sur TF1. (fr) The Jewel in the Crown was een Engelse televisieserie van de jaren 80, gebaseerd op de roman van Paul Scott. De serie telde 13 afleveringen, en was te zien op tv van 9 januari 1984 tot 3 april 1984. (nl) The Jewel in the Crown (en) comment The Jewel in the Crown (1984) is a British television serial about the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II, based upon the Raj Quartet novels (1965–75) by British author Paul Scott. Granada Television produced the series for the ITV network. (en) The Jewel in the Crown was een Engelse televisieserie van de jaren 80, gebaseerd op de roman van Paul Scott. De serie telde 13 afleveringen, en was te zien op tv van 9 januari 1984 tot 3 april 1984.

(nl) Le Joyau de la couronne (The Jewel in the Crown) est une mini-série britannique en un épisode de 120 minutes et 13 épisodes de 50 minutes, créée par Ken Taylor d'après l'œuvre de Paul Scott intitulée Le Quatuor indien, et diffusée entre le et le sur ITV. En France, la mini-série a été diffusée à partir du 23 octobre 1987 sur TF1. (fr) The Jewel In The Crown (1984) - Download here The Jewel In The Crown (1984) about torrent: The Jewel In The Crown (1984) We searched for this here: Monova, Thepiratebay, Torrentfunk Monova Série Britânica sobre os tempos finais da 2ª GG na Índia Britânica. Baseada no romance de Paul Scott.

Fiction Review Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown and The Day of the Scorpion Volume 2: The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils ————————— In the early weeks of 1984, for an hour each Tuesday and Sunday evening, a strange silence fell over England, or at any rate over the bourgeois precincts thereof. Streets were deserted; bartenders and waiters dozed idle at their stations; theaters and cinemas played to half-empty houses; telephones and doorbells went unanswered. The English middle classes were in front of their TV sets, gripped by the first (Tuesdays) or repeat (Sundays) broadcasting of The Jewel in the Crown, in fourteen weekly episodes. I was living in the English Midlands myself at the time and recall the enthusiasm. It was, I think, the greatest success for a TV fiction miniseries since The Forsyte Saga seventeen years earlier. The success was well deserved. The miniseries is now available on DVD, and I have recently watched it for comparison with these books. With due allowance for advances in TV production standards — especially sound recording — over this past twenty years, the TV adaptation is still excellent viewing.

The casting is superb, drawing from the great mid-20th-century generations of British and Anglo-Indian actors. Peggy Ashcroft is there, and Eric Porter (a Forsyte veteran), and many younger performers, some of whom — Art Malik, Charles Dance, Geraldine James — were made famous by this production. This, one found oneself thinking, watching the miniseries, is what TV is for: the meticulous reproduction of good, long, middlebrow fiction. This justifies the medium, if anything can. The TV miniseries was based on a tetralogy of novels written by an Englishman, Paul Scott, and published between 1966 and 1975. The Jewel in the Crown is actually only the first of the four novels; the producers of the TV miniseries confusingly appropriated this title for the entire tetralogy, which is more properly called The Raj Quartet. At the sixtieth anniversary of Indian independence last fall, Knopf brought out The Raj Quartet in an elegant new Everyman's Library edition.

The four novels are packed into two volumes, the first prefaced with an illuminating introduction by Hilary Spurling, the author's biographer, and with a chronology of Scott's life, keyed to literary and historical events. The two volumes together make a fine set for anyone who enjoys good unpretentious fiction, and who would like to understand something about India, Pakistan, and the way Britain's presence in those countries came to its inglorious end. ————————— The action of The Raj Quartet takes place over a five-year span, from the nationalist "Quit India" disturbances of 1942 to Britain's departure in 1947. The consequences of these tremendous events are still being played out in the news today. Paul Scott's four novels show us this history through the fates of several persons, most of them English. By the novelist's art we see the birth pangs of modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — nations that contain over a fifth of the world's present population. Scott's direct experience of India was comparatively meager. He had been posted there during and just after World War II.

The Japanese had overrun Burma in 1942, and attempted an invasion of eastern India in the Spring of 1944, being repelled by Sir William Slim's Fourteenth Army — called the "Forgotten Army" because news of its victories was drowned out by the invasion of Europe that Summer. Scott arrived at his posting near the Burmese border as these events were winding down. He served as an officer in one of Slim's air supply units, sometimes flying in to Burma with the supply crews he supervised. It is improbable, but not impossible, that he encountered the late George MacDonald Fraser, who was fighting his way down through Burma with the Indian Seventeenth Division at this time, and who survived to become the author of the Flashman novels — material for a wonderful miniseries themselves, if some producer can raise the budget. After the war Scott became a London literary figure of the minor sort, working for a firm of literary agents, and turning out book reviews, occasional radio plays, and novels. He published eight novels from 1952 to 1964. Nearly all had some Indian theme or connection.

Scott is, in fact, an illustration of the truth that we accumulate most of our impressions about the world during our first quarter century of life, our personalities and interests being then pretty much "set." Scott was just 26 when he left India after the war. There were two brief — a few weeks each — return trips in1964 and 1969, after he had conceived the idea of a really big India novel, but even then Scott's entire direct experience of the country was little more than three years. Those three years provided sufficient imaginative nourishment for a lifetime of fiction writing. The lifetime was shorter than it might have been, probably hastened to its end at age fifty-seven by Scott's heroic consumption of legal stimulants. Approaching his last illness, he told a doctor that he drank a quart of vodka a day, and smoked sixty to eighty cigarettes. The recollections of friends and acquaintances make this perfectly credible. Hilary Spurling's biography, though as sympathetic as it could fairly be, does not leave one with the impression that Paul Scott would have been an ideal house guest. None of that matters in evaluating the man's art, of course.

What is its value to readers of today — this eminently televisable epic of sahibs and pandits, missionaries and policemen, Anglicized Indians and Hindophile Englishmen? ————————— The central event of The Raj Quartet is the rape, during the 1942 disturbances, of a young Englishwoman by a gang of Indian ruffians. The victim, Daphne Manners, is the niece of Sir Henry Manners, a former governor of the province in which the event takes place. Only recently arrived in India, Daphne had scandalized the British expats by striking up a friendship with Hari Kumar, a young Indian. Kumar had been expensively educated in England until his father went bankrupt and committed suicide, obliging Hari to return to a life of poverty in India. Daphne and Hari had in fact commenced an affair, and just consummated it, when the rape happened. The local police superintendent, Ronald Merrick, investigates the case. Of all the characters in the Quartet, Merrick is the one most frequently present, or lurking noticeably in the background, throughout all four novels. It is plain that the author found Merrick the most fascinating of his creations.

Cool, intelligent, efficient, and dedicated to his duty, gifted with "an unshakable sense of his own authority," yet burdened with class resentment — ever conscious of his own lower-middle-class origins when among the better-spoken and -educated sahibs and memsahibs of British India — Merrick's development through the story is summed up accurately by Hilary Spurling in her introduction: The kind of man always welcome in a tight spot, Merrick slowly comes to seem … more like the man who brings the tight spot with him. [Ms. Spurling's italics.] Merrick, who has essayed some attempts on Daphne's favors himself, decides that Hari was complicit in the rape, and arrests and tortures him. Gradually the reader comes to share the author's fascination with Merrick. Although it is impossible to like Merrick, it is none the less the case, as so often with actual human beings of this type, that there exists beneath the unpleasantness a core — difficult to look at directly, but not easy to ignore — of icy authenticity.

Merrick's starkly reductionist approach to human nature is not, I think (and hope) the whole truth about our species, but it is an attitude to which we are willingly, if guiltily, drawn, seeing in it something we recognize in ourselves. Reporting to third parties on Merrick's interrogation of him, Hari says: In India he automatically became a Sahib. He hobnobbed on equal terms with people who would snub him at home … What they all had in common was the contempt they all felt for the native race of the country they ruled. … He said you couldn't buck this issue, that relationships between people were based on contempt, not love, and that contempt was the prime human emotion because no human being was ever going to believe all human beings were born equal. If there was an emotion almost as strong as contempt it was envy. He said a man's personality existed at the point of equilibrium between the degree of his envy and the degree of his contempt. The rape of Daphne Manners, and the concurrent assault on an old missionary woman, ripple down through the 2,000 pages of the Quartet, stirring and shifting the destinies of many people.

There are, most notably, the Layton sisters, Sarah and Susan, "daughters of the regiment" (their father is a Colonel in the Indian Army). These are a sense-and-sensibility pair, the calm English good sense all concentrated in Sarah, while Susan, pretty and social but psychologically fragile, endures various living nightmares, not all of her own creating. The narrative framework of the books is a skillful mix, much of it in the voices of the characters themselves, some in letters or official reports, some presented from a distance by a detached observer. In the fourth book, as if the author was concerned that we might be tiring of the characters we've so far encountered, a major new personality is introduced and, a little later, given a narrative voice. This is Guy Perron, another embodiment of English sense and sang-froid. One is not surprised when Guy has an affair — a diffident and sensible one, of course! — with Sarah. Guy is the anti-Merrick. He has, for example, a sympathetic interest in Indian history and culture, and a good knowledge thereof. He detests Merrick, of course.

Still, he and Merrick are two sides of the imperial mentality, often found co-existing in the same person, as I think Scott was aware, he himself being one such person. George Orwell is Exhibit A here, his dislike of the imperial subject races continually bursting through the surface in Burmese Days. (Though his principles were sympathetic to Burma's independence, as Scott's were to India's, in Shooting an Elephant Orwell cannot resist sneering of the nationalists that: "No one had the guts to raise a riot.") These insights into the imperial experience, and into (see below) the larger matter of the co-existence of different races, help to keep the Quartet moving forward through some doldrums of authorial self-indulgence and occasional squalls of literary sin. Scott had a fondness for plonking symbolism that he seems to have been aware of, but could not always restrain. Though I did not spot any inconsistencies, there are some coincidences and improbabilities. The Englishwomen all seem wonderfully fertile: Daphne, Susan, and Sarah all get pregnant from a single sexual encounter. Something to do with that spicy Indian food, perhaps.

For an American reader — and even, I glumly suppose, for a British reader under fifty — the casual use of untranslated Indian words will be disconcerting, too. How many non-Indians nowadays know the difference between a dhoti and a dhobi? (The latter washes the former.) A glossary would have been handy. These are petty cavils, though. No work as long as this can be free from small faults. The Raj Quartet easily transcends them, with insights into history and human nature that, I think on reflection, raise it above the merely middlebrow. Upper-middlebrow, perhaps? British India never found its Tolstoy, but in Paul Scott it came close to finding its Dostoyevsky. ————————— Perhaps the lasting relevance of the Quartet, other than for sheer entertainment value, is in what it has to tell us about race and "diversity," matters that are going to occupy us mightily in the decades to come. With recent discoveries in human genetics, we are beginning to get a clear understanding of the history of our species, and of the ancient inbred populations that now comprise it.

Those populations, each with its distinctive characteristics, formed in isolation from each other during the long decamillennia of the Paleolithic. The rise of literate civilization is a comparatively recent event tacked on to the end of that long development. With it came the mass encounters between peoples hitherto known to each other only scantily, or not at all: the conquests of Islam, the great tidal movements of the steppe nomads (one consequence of which was the Moghul Empire, into whose ruins the eighteenth-century British moved their furniture), the colonization of the Americas and Oceania, the Atlantic slave trade, the humiliation of China and the opening of Japan, and of course Britain's Indian empire. Our children are taught in school, and our politicians doggedly insist, that there is no obstacle to disparate populations getting along harmoniously even when commingled in the millions — no obstacle, at any rate, other than the willful malignity of a few spoilers ("racists") who ought to be ignored, re-educated, or silenced. The unhappy history of great population encounters suggests that this may be all empty wishful thinking.

It was impossible for thoughtful Englishmen in India not to reflect on these things, though their manner of doing so was of course dependent on the attitudes they took to the subcontinent with them, and on their individual inclinations and personalities, and on the scientific understandings of their time. Paul Scott's characters do so reflect, rather often. Lady Manners, writing to a cultivated Indian friend: What terrifies me is the thought that gradually, when the splendours of civilized divorce [she means, of Indian independence] and protestations of continuing as good friends are worked out, the real animus will emerge, the one both our people just managed to keep in check when there was reason to suppose that it was wrong, because it could lead neither rulers nor ruled anywhere. I mean of course the dislike and fear that exists between black and white. Hari Kumar, to an English friend, a young man he was at school with: At the moment there seems to be no one country that I owe an undivided duty to. Perhaps this is really the pattern of the future. I don't know whether that encourages me or alarms me. If there's no country, what else is left but the anthropological distinction of colour?

That would be a terrible conflict because the scores that there are to settle at this level are desperate. I'm not sure, though, that the conflict isn't one that the human race deserves to undergo. Sarah Layton , out riding with a well-born young Muslim gentleman, indulges herself in some speculations about the effect of climate and topography on the characters of nations: Muslim men did have [the military virtues]. Sarah corrected herself: not Muslim men, but Indians who were descended like Mr Kasim from Middle Eastern stock: Arabs, Persians, and Turks. They had retained the sturdiness of races whom extremes of heat and cold … had toughened. Sarah's musings, which go on for over a page, seemed quaintly Galtonian in the 1960s, and the author may have inserted them for satirical effect. Now, forty years on, Galton doesn't look such a fool, and the satire, if any was intended, is quite lost. (I note in passing here the impression Scott gives — I get a whiff of it in Kipling, too, and in the Flashman books — that the British, especially the military ones, preferred Muslim Indians to Hindus, as being more manly.

Doublethink must have been active here, as some of Britain's most prized Indian troops — the Gurkhas, for example — were Hindus. The preference is plain, none the less. Perhaps it was just imperialist fellow-feeling with the subcontinent's previous proprietors, or perhaps it was solidarity between monotheists.) ————————— In a key passage near the very end of the Quartet, Guy Perron summarizes the odd symmetry in the connection between Ronald Merrick and Hari Kumar: And yet how logical that meeting was, between Kumar … and Merrick, … a man … who lacked entirely that liberal instinct which is so dear to historians that they lay it out like a guideline through the unmapped forests of prejudice and self-interest as though this line, and not the forest, is our history. [My italics there.] Place the two men in England, Perron continues, and it is Kumar on whom the eye of that liberal historian falls: "he is a symbol of our virtue." Merrick, the lower-middle-class striver, is invisible. Put them both in India, however, and both will disappear from sight. They have wandered off the guideline, into the jungle.

But throw a spotlight on them and it is Merrick on whom it falls. There he is, the unrecorded man, one of the kind of men we really are (as Sarah would say). Yes, their meeting was logical. And they had met before, countless times. You can say they are still meeting, that their meeting reveals the real animus, the one that historians won't recognize, or which we relegate to our margins. [My italics again.] These dark thoughts are placed in the mouths, or on the pens, of sympathetic characters, created by a novelist of liberal and anti-Imperial inclinations. Scott's original reaction to the behavior of his countrymen in India, during his wartime tour of duty, seems to have been similar to Orwell's twenty years earlier: a sort of detached distaste, mixed with some amusement. "The overall argument" of the Quartet's last book, Scott wrote to a friend while working on that book, "is that the greatest contribution to the tragi-comedy of Anglo-India was the total indifference to and ignorance of Indian affairs of the people at home, who finally decided to hand India back in as many pieces as was necessary so long as it was got rid of.

Which is what happened." A writer of those views, and with the limited engagement with India that Scott had had, might very easily have produced a bitter caricature of the imperial British, or perhaps a thoughtful caricature gussied up with brilliant literary effects in the manner of E.M. Forster. (Scott admired A Passage to India for its insight, but seems to have been somewhat intimidated by it as a literary production.) Instead, through the unfathomable mystery of literary creation, Scott gave us one of the best — truest, most unsparing — descriptions ever written of what happens when two ancient populations collide. Good sense, good intentions, civilized administration, liberal inclinations, and generosity of spirit — all those things "so dear to historians" — are present on both sides; yet at last they count for less than we think, or wish.

The real decision-maker is too often the unrecorded man: the Ronald Merrick, or the man who kills him, or the sepoy who betrays Sarah's brother-in-law to the Japanese, or the anonymous (and chillingly polite) Hindu who murders Sarah's Muslim friend Kasim in the sectarian violence that attended independence, or those "dark young men of random destiny and private passions" that so vex Count Bronowsky, the wily, worldly vizier of a local prince. Those dark young men are with us still. One of them dispatched Benazir Bhutto while I was writing this. Others are there a-plenty, in the friction zone where tribes, faiths, and races meet, where modernity encounters historical resentment, where humanitarianism collides with identity. They defy the glib nostrums of the world-improvers, they spit on sweet reason and good intentions, they laugh to scorn the bourgeois verities of cool, shy northern peoples. Statesmen, generals, intellectuals, and merchant princes will pronounce and propose, posture and plead. Still the unrecorded man may have the last word. The events surrounding Indian independence exposed some dark human terrain. In fiction, I have encountered no better guide to that terrain than Paul Scott.

TV VIEW - 'JEWEL IN THE CROWN'- SUPERB DRAMA - NYTimes.com TV VIEW; 'JEWEL IN THE CROWN'- SUPERB DRAMA By John J. O'Connor Published: December 16, 1984 There are those of us who have long been insisting that television is not just a convenient conduit for carrying old films, that the medium has its own distinctive artistic and esthetic forms. Still another outstanding example of the kind of undertaking that would be impossible in the traditional settings of film or theater is getting underway tonight at 9 on Masterpiece Theater, public television's enduring showcase for largely British imports. Produced by Christopher Morahan for Granada TV, ''The Jewel in the Crown'' is based on four Paul Scott novels known as ''The Raj Quartet.'' The television adaptation by Ken Taylor runs for 15 hours, the first two of which have been combined for a single episode on WNET/13 this evening. The entire project adds up to that increasingly rare experience - superb drama of reverberating substance. Viewers in search of indisputable quality are advised to set aside their Sunday evenings, brooking no interruptions, for ''The Jewel in the Crown'' over the next three months.

The setting and the subject is India, a country that has been tragically prominent in the news recently. Ironically, India has also been receiving unusual attention in major entertainment productions, including the Academy Award-winning ''Gandhi,'' the miscalculated cable- TV version of ''The Far Pavilions'' and David Lean's new film version of E. M. Forster's ''Passage to India.'' Some of the effects from this sudden attention for a relatively neglected subject have been decidedly frivolous. Fashions in Britain, we are told, are being influenced by Indian images, from local dress to the khaki uniforms of the former English ruling residents. There is talk about a certain nostalgia in Britain for the supposed glory days of Empire. All of which, if true, is certainly puzzling. ''The Jewel in the Crown'' is anything but nostalgic. It is an unflinching portrait of the arrogance and inevitable corruption of imperialism, exploring its underbelly of vicious social snobbery and racism. Some observers suggest that American audiences might find parallels with this country's experience in Vietnam. That is stretching matters unnecessarily.

The United States' role in places like the Philippines or Puerto Rico, not to mention the current scenarios in Central America, are perhaps more apt comparisons. Like ''A Passage to India,'' with which it shares several key actors, ''A Jewel in the Crown'' concerns a rape. In the words of the late Mr. Scott, his story tells ''of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened.'' The rape of a young woman is a symbol, of course, for the rape of a country. The violent act provides a distillation of the peculiar spectacle of two nations in fierce opposition but still, as Mr. Scott put it, locked in an imperial embrace that transcended the normal boundaries of love and hate. The television story goes from 1942, at the height of World War II, to 1947 and the very eve of Indian independence. The Scott novels go a bit further into the past, using a ''Rashomon'' technique of flashbacks and recounting the same incident from different vantage points. Lawrence Durrell used similar devices in ''The Alexandria Quartet.'' Mr.

Taylor's television adaptation, outlined with the aid of Sir Denis Foreman, head of Granada TV, manages to get most of the Scott story into chronological form, punctuated here and there with an illuminating flashback. The complicated story involves dozens of major characters and some of the key transitions, particularly in what is now Episode Four, are tricky and demand patience. But the careful accumulation of marvelous detail is never less than fascinating. And once again in a British production, the performances are rarely less than extraordinary. The first episodes revolve around the intriguing figure of Hari Kumar, known, in his posh British public- school days, as Harry Coomer. Hari was taken to England at the age of 2 by his ambitious Indian father who wanted to make sure that his son would grow up to be a proper English gentleman. But when his father's money ran out, Hari was shipped back to Mayapore, where the once-elegant cricket player found himself an outsider, snubbed by the British rulers, known as ''the Raj,'' and despised by Indians for being too British.

Young Hari had become an invisible man, lucky to get a modest job on an English-language newspaper that enabled him to occasionally cross the river from his own humble home to the grand residences of the British. At this initial point, there arrives in Mayapore a rather gawky young woman named Daphne Manners, the niece of a military family with a respected name in India. She is staying with the formidable Lady Chattergee, an Indian woman who navigates her way cautiously through powerful political circles in which both Indian and British figures mingle, however uneasily. She warns Daphne that ''you may find things here of which you do not approve, of which I do not approve.'' In her typically direct and disarmingly innocent way, Daphne replies that ''perhaps they should be changed.'' This is precisely the kind of attitude that makes her a threat to the British establishment, which is determined to maintain its position of privilege in India.

1 The Jewel In The Crown - The Complete Series | DVD Review | Film @ The Digital Fix The Jewel In The Crown - The Complete Series 06:00 on 18th Apr 2005 By Les AndersonLes Anderson For fans like myself of classic telly on DVD, this serial has been at the top of the wish-list for years. There has been a Region 1 set available since 2001 but, if buyers� comments on amazon.com are anything to go by, the picture quality on that is, at best, not much better than the old VHS release. This set however is quite another thing. The Jewel in the Crown was made by Granada and transmitted (on ITV which surprises many people nowadays who think it was a BBC production) in early 1984 to huge audiences and was a massive hit both in the UK and overseas. It was adapted from a series of novels known as The Raj Quartet written by Paul Scott and published between 1966 and 1975. It made household names of Art Malik, Tim Pigott-Smith and Geraldine James and a matinee idol of Charles Dance � who doesn�t even appear until Episode 10.

Some indication of its popularity can be gathered from the fact that in London from the mid-80s there was an Indian restaurant in a Covent Garden basement called The Jewel in The Ground� The biggest name in the cast at the time was Dame Peggy Ashcroft, a contemporary of Gielgud and Olivier and the most distinguished stage actress of her generation. Following her success in The Jewel in the Crown she went on to star in A Passage to India for David Lean. Jewel was part of a popular genre of the early 1980s known to some now as �Raj rage�. Other examples include Attenborough�s biopic Gandhi, A Passage to India and, on a lighter note, the romantic TV mini-series The Far Pavilions. This interest in the colonial past can be partly attributed to the social upheavals in the UK resulting from Thatcherism rearing its ugly head in the early 1980s while the final death throes of Empire were being expressed in the Falklands War. The same period also saw the beginnings of what would become known as Heritage Television, a genre which encapsulated a certain type of Thatcherism with its nostalgic celebration of historic English achievement and its cultural patrimony all around us.

The genre was kicked off by the wildly popular Brideshead Revisited in 1980 and probably reached its pinnacle in the 90s with the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Jewel however subverts the genre somewhat by casting a highly critical eye over the conduct of the British in India. The Drama The Jewel in the Crown was originally planned to run for 15 weekly episodes of 52 minutes each � playing at one hour each once adverts had been added. Before transmission it was decided to edit the first two episodes together into one feature-length opening episode which ran at 1 hr 45 minutes. The episodes were aired first on ITV on a Tuesday evening at 9pm (a traditional slot for quality prestige drama) and then repeated the following Sunday on Channel 4. An unusual arrangement at any time but one which led to the show achieving instant popular success and high ratings. The story is very much a human drama following the repercussions of �The Manners Affair� played out during the last five years of British colonial rule in India. It begins in the summer of 1942 and closes on the eve of Indian independence in 1947.

Power politics only enter occasionally into the drama and for those more interested in the bigger picture, I would recommend watching Gandhi. The entire first episode sets up the pivotal event � the gang-rape of a young English nurse, Daphne Manners (Susan Wooldridge), in the Bibighar Gardens in the fictional city of Mayapore. The remaining episodes examine the repercussions of this event, both personal and political. Daphne, a gauche but spirited young woman, becomes romantically involved with a young Indian man, Hari Kumar (Art Malik) who grew up in England and was educated at an exclusive public school, Chillingborough. He now lives with his aunt in Mayapore following the death of his parents and feels very much out of place in India � �too English for the Indians, too Indian for the English�. After a sexual liaison one evening in the Bibighar Gardens, Hari and Daphne are attacked by a local gang. Daphne is raped and Hari is beaten up.

The local chief of police, Ronald Merrick (Tim Piggott-Smith) who had already proposed to and been turned down by Daphne, seizes the opportunity to arrest, torture, and wrongfully imprison Hari, driven as much by warped sexual jealousy as a desire to stamp out growing political unrest. A sadistic double-hard bastard with a massive chip on his shoulder about his middle-class social �inferiority� compared with the local upper-class British army officers, Merrick is also a deeply-repressed homosexual. Hari testifies in a later episode that Merrick sexually assaulted him during his �interrogation�. At this point the narrative takes some extremely interesting turns. After spending the first two episodes presenting two likeable young lovers who indulge in a socially-dangerous romance, the narrative then swiftly removes them from the drama. Daphne dies in childbirth in the third episode and Hari spends most of the serial locked away in prison. The narrative focus then shifts to another young Englishwoman, Sarah Layton (Geraldine James), a WAC Corporal and member of an Army family.

She is introduced as a neighbour of Daphne�s aunt, Lady Manners (played by the luminous Rachel Kempson) now tending Daphne�s baby daughter Parvati. I haven�t read any of the source novels but everyone involved in the production remarks on their multi-viewpoint elliptical narratives which jump around in time constantly. One academic notes that these �were not easily adapted to a form based around linear progression, continuity of action and character and the promise of eventual narrative resolution�. The one constant throughout is Merrick who appears in every episode (in flashback in the final two) through his social-climbing insinuation and eventual marriage into Sarah�s family, even though he is rarely the focus of attention. The principal narrative threads in the greater tapestry of the drama are interlinked by meetings (chance or otherwise) between many of the same characters who pop up now and again throughout. In fact, little is resolved by the end of the drama except for Merrick�s murder for his part in the Manners Affair. The fourteen or so hours devoted to the drama give a measured pace which never becomes boring or stale. Scenes have room to breathe and the pace never feels hurried or compressed.

The script credits the audience with some intelligence as each episode launches straight into the drama with none of this modern �previously on�� nonsense, although there are plenty of recaps in the dialogue along the lines of �You won�t remember the Manners Affair, let me tell you about it��. Concentration is aided by the narrative focussing on a single character in turn � first Daphne, then Sarah and then in Episode 10 by the introduction of a completely new character, Guy Perron (Charles Dance) which acts as a very neat device to renew interest in the established characters by seeing them from a third-party viewpoint. There follows another neat device by having the penultimate episode open with Merrick�s funeral which allows Perron to spend the remaining two episodes unearthing the unsavoury truth about Merrick�s death (actually a brutal revenge murder) which could not be revealed to Sarah. There are also certain repeated themes and motifs to lend dramatic cohesion � images of fire abound and the handing-down of the eponymous painting from character to character. The actors use the measured pace to develop character relationships which is vital to this drama as its essence is what I would refer to as The Dance of Manners (no pun intended).

There are many scenes of people, particularly English ladies, sitting around chatting and treating each other with acid-etched courtesy. This is essential to convey the ingrained snobbery, racism and anti-semitism of the British colonial ruling class which is at the heart of Scott�s story. This gives the opportunity to the acting heavyweights in the cast such as Judy Parfitt (playing Sarah�s gin-swigging brittle bitch of a mother) and Peggy Ashcroft (the seemingly fluffy old spinster Barbie Batchelor) to pull the gloves off and rip each other apart. Ashcroft in particular dazzles as she explores the seemingly simple character of Barbie, a retired missionary and now companion to Mabel Layton, the elderly widow of Sarah�s grandfather. Two of the highlights of the entire piece are the confrontation scenes following the death of Barbie�s employer and friend, Mabel. These allow Ashcroft to peel away layers of the character as the scenes develop and reveal her to be a tough old bird under that fluffy exterior. The first with Mildred (Judy Parfitt) sizzles with tension as she evicts Barbie from the home she has shared with Mabel and which Mildred has now inherited.

The second is perfectly and achingly played as Barbie, now a paying guest of the local vicar and his wife, is interrogated terribly politely by said wife and asked to refute the �rumours at the club� about Barbie�s possible lesbianism � without using the term, of course. Ashcroft imbues the character, so easily a potential figure of fun, with dignity and courage. Indeed, with matters sexual, the serial boldly ventures into areas rarely, if ever, seen before in a prestige British historical drama. In Guy Perron�s first appearance he is taken to An Evening at the Maharanee�s, a louche and decadent party with a noticeably pansexual guest list. All tastes catered for. In one of the most unforgettable scenes on first transmission, Barbie stumbles upon Sarah�s mother being vigorously fucked by her officer lover, made memorable by Judy Parfitt�s desperate intensity in a very brief but unusual scene showing a middle-aged woman actually having sex. Merrick, as already mentioned, is homosexual, as is one of the other major characters, Count Bronowsky (Eric Porter) and a memorable but vital minor character, Corporal �Sophie� Dixon.

He is Merrick�s nurse after his arm is amputated and is played pitch-perfectly by Warren Clarke now better know for Dalziel and Pascoe. Even then he was known as a craggy character actor and he plays against type brilliantly. And what his character acknowledges is the fact that many gay men and women served with valour in the forces during the Second World War, even the screaming queens. Merrick confronts him specifically on this issue, noting his bravery under fire and asks him pointedly �What are you? A hero or a pansy?�. No clear answer is given nor indeed needed as this piece is very much about avoiding two-dimensional stereotyped characterisations. One of its great strengths as a TV drama is the casting of fabulously experienced character actors throughout who can invest their characters with the layers required. People such as Rosemary Leach, Fabia Drake, Anna Cropper and the unique Janet Henfrey amongst many. Even Saeed Jaffrey, last seen as a scenery-chewing old ham going right over the top on Corrie a few years ago turns in a restrained, dignified performance as the Nawab of Mirat.

Particularly so as one of the serial�s crucial scenes in explaining English racism has him turned away from the English Officers� Club in the capital city of the state he rules simply because he is an Indian. The Discs The serial is split over four discs. The picture quality is simply stunning considering the source material. Also considering the very poor picture quality on the recent release of Brideshead Revisited by the same company. Granada, however, have really made an effort with this one. The prints used are almost flawless so I suspect a digital restoration of the source materials has been carried out. In fourteen hours of film, I saw perhaps ten seconds of noticeable print damage. The original newsreel footage has been left untouched though and is still very scratched and dirty, probably for authenticity�s sake. Unfortunately the clarity of the mastering does make apparent the shortcomings of the source materials. Like many dramas of the early 1980s, The Jewel in the Crown was shot entirely on 16mm film utilising a great deal of location shooting. Ten years earlier, the series would very likely have been made almost entirely in the studio on video but things changed a lot in the late 1970s.

Film cameras became lighter and easier to use and film stock more sensitive. I also suspect that a move away from studio-based production came about due to union activity resulting in damaging strikes in the mid-70s which led to a great deal of studio-based production being lost. Television location shooting had used 16mm film for decades as TV cameras were huge mains-powered behemoths which required a mobile production suite to run them and so were not readily portable. On the other hand, film cameras were very portable. This became the medium of choice in the 1980s for many TV dramas but its small frame size relative to 35mm film led to noticeable grain and poor colour saturation by comparison. This was less noticeable on TV sets of the time than it would be today. Having said that, Ray Goode, the lighting cameraman on The Jewel in the Crown, worked miracles given the production circumstances. He was required to shoot in tropical conditions on location in India, often shooting at night as well as shooting in locations in England standing in for India, numerous studio interiors and some location interiors � over a period of eighteen months. This leads to an enormous variety of lighting conditions and the images do reflect this.

On the whole, the images are sharp and colours pretty faithful if a little muted. Patterns in clothing, both printed and woven are delineated very nicely. There is some noticeable softness in landscape shots, most likely due to a combination of film stock and humidity in the air. There is a very occasional hint of blocking and shimmer on dimly-lit interiors but these are barely noticeable. However some of the more dramatic interiors such as Hari�s prison cell become a little more chiaroscuro than originally intended. Actors� faces are warmly lit but shadows become very dark indeed, unlike exteriors where shadow detail is nicely brought out. One criticism I have is that scenes are clearly lit to favour the paler skins of the English actors. The Indian actors� skin tones often vary noticeably from scene to scene, particularly so in Art Malik�s case. But, as always, this would have been less noticeable on TVs at the time the serial was first transmitted. The sound is clear and effective � dialogue is helped immensely by the actors� excellent diction and the atmospheric �ethnic� music by George Fenton burbles away in the background, never dominating or intruding.

The menus are attractive enough but appear to have been designed to be reminiscent of the d�cor of a 1980s Indian restaurant. Each episode is broken down into four chapters which are accessible from still menus. Episode 1 has eight chapters. The Extras Not bad considering it�s an archive release. Each disc has an image gallery called �Postcards from the Raj� consisting of production stills which have to be keyed through. One drawback is that each image is framed in the generic decorative frame used for all menu images which reduces their size somewhat. Disc 3 has two extra image galleries. The first is called �Location Scouting in India� and plays as a flip album of location scouting polaroids. The second is a reproduction of the painting �The Jewel in the Crown� which features throughout the serial. Unfortunately both are reproduced so small as to be virtually useless. And you will be well sick of George Fenton�s cod-Elgar theme tune by the time you�ve flipped through all of these. There are four audio-commentaries, all recorded earlier this year. Episode 1 has a commentary track from Art Malik and Tim Pigott-Smith moderated by Robert Ross.

In an informative and anecdotal conversation, the two men are clearly very proud of their work in The Jewel in the Crown and of the serial as a whole. Episode 4 has a solo commentary from the producer and co-director of the serial, Christopher Morahan. The words �I don�t know why he bothered� come to mind. There are lengthy silences and most of the time he simply describes in hushed tones what�s happening on screen. The final two episodes have contributions from Charles Dance (urbane and charming) and Geraldine James in conversation with Robert Ross. As with Art and Tim, these are two people who are very proud of the work they did in the serial and appreciate the quality of the show as a whole. There are occasional lapses into back-slapping luvvyspeak but their warmth and professionalism shine through. On the whole, I can�t recommend this set enough. This serial is one of the greatest TV dramas of all and has been given a sensitive and loving release. This is a must-have. Film Masterpiece Theatre - Season 14, Episode 8: The Jewel in the Crown (1) - TV.com The Jewel in the Crown ...

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Question: Which TV serial of 1984 was based on the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott?
Answer: THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN