Beecham House

[florentina1]

Is anyone planning to watch this tonight?

About to start... Just watching end of Antiques Roadshow.
Will be weird seeing Mrs Patmore as a different character.

Anyone else watching?

I’m watching. Is it based on a book?

Apparently not....

I am finding this very wooden. Lavish sets and nice to look at but hammy acting and old fashioned actorly diction.
And the music is intrusive.

It’s a bit cheesy so far. Very decorative but creaky dialogue and the handsome lead ( who he?) is dreadfully wooden.

Tom Bateman. Last seen being wooden and handsome in Vanity Fair.

Rawdon ! Well he was good in that, so I shall blame the direction

Good heavens! Tom Bateman is one of 14 children!!

First episode so lots of scene setting but not grabbing me so far . I'm sure Bessie Carter is a very competent actor but perhaps having Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton as parents has helped enormously in getting her foot in the door , just like all those very ordinary looking children of slebs who become models .

Always so irritating when people with famous parents get leading roles.

Nice house and garden

Agree so far wooden and a but trite, but the historical advisor is William Dalrymple, so background etc should at least be authentic,

My goodness this was bad. I’ve seen ads for supermarket curry sauces that had more narrative depth. The Guardian’s given it one star in its utterly scathing review.

I heard the writer/director Gurinder Chadha ( Bend it Like Beckham plus s omuch more) promoting this on the radio this week and so had quite high expectations. Not fulfilled thus far.

Read some of the promos for this and even though it features gorgeous Pierre from Engrenages (though it's not the same when he's not speaking French) I wasn't even tempted to take a look. With the exception of "Jewel in the Crown" from way back, raj era dramas are invariably expensive disasters.

Had a look at the twitter hashtag and the overall mood seems to be "That's an hour of my life I'll never get back."

Oh, oh - Gregory Fitoussi who was very watchable ( both in the picturesque and the believable actor sense) in the wonderful Spiral is unrecognisable as the cartoon French general, only one step away from twirling his moustaches.

Why have 2 leading men who look the same? Very disappointing first episode... I had high hope for this.

I lasted half an hour. All that money to produce something so,bad.

Are we talking 'so bad it's good' levels of awful?

So bad you would be embarrassed to be in it.

Oh dear.... well at least the cast got paid and got to hang out in India for a while!

This tickled me from Lucy Mangan's review in the Guardian: "lines that make them sound as if they are giving dictation to a secretary they have every reason not to trust".

If (as the Radio Times hints at) this was Tom Bateman's audition for Bond, I'll be putting my money on Richard Madden.

Its a shame as it could be a really interesting look at the British in India, but I just ended up regreting being able to hear the dialogue, when on so many other tv series the voices are so muffled!

Its almost like it have been patched together by a computer programme saying lets take a bit of this and a bit of that and just change the location. Or maybe Gurinder Chadha is just to nice a person to do the brutal truth. Didn't she make Viceroy House?

Interesting to think that the East Inda Company was so sucessful at colonising a continent through trade that the British Government had to take it over and rule through the colonial service. Makes you wonder whether in not so many years the US will want to take over Microsoft and Google because as private companies they will have more power than the state.

Will be interesting to see if they use the often shared concept that it was only when white western christian women arrived in India that what had been the acceptance of white european men marrying Indian women as equals, was frowned upon and later seen to be unacceptable. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/18SDBJqWwgc7VLDM7MhGK2S/a-love-story-that-broke-the-conventional-boundaries-of-empire

Oh, dear! I have to admit that I started watching this last night and fell asleep, missing at least 25 minutes or so. I was thinking I ought to take another look on catch up, but having read all your comments and the Guardian review, I'm beginning to realise why I did fall asleep.