Just another Sunday soap

ITV’s new drama Beecham House is set in late 18th-century India where the British and French were still battling it out for supremacy. Its opening credits feature the east at its most exotic, with a montage of ceremonial elephants parading, sari-clad women gliding and lotus flowers opening. The hero is John Beecham (Tom Bateman), a hunky Englishman who proves honourable to the point of mild priggishness as he navigates his way through a world of dusky beauties, inscrutable orientals and treacherous Frenchies. If there were any Indians around at the time who weren’t gorgeously attired rich people, violent bandits or servants who took real pride in their work, we’ve yet to meet them.

All in all, then, it’s just as well that the series is produced, directed and co-written by Gurinder Chadha, the maker of Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham. Otherwise, it might be quite hard to accept the idea that this is a radical piece of work designed to undermine the usual stereotypes of the Brits in India. At times, in fact, we might even think that it’s a bit corny.

Certainly, there doesn’t seem anything very radical about the dialogue. On the whole, everybody here speaks in the kind of ornate sentences that are the dramatic equivalent of purple prose. They constantly help us out by explaining the historical background we need, or by providing handy character summaries of the people we’re about to meet (‘Begum Samru is not to be underestimated. She is a favourite of the emperor who treats her like his own daughter’). When particularly angry, they end conversations with a brusque ‘I bid you good day’.

In Sunday’s first episode, a brief pre–credit sequence established Beecham’s nobility by showing him saving a group of gorgeously attired rich Indians from an attack by violent bandits.