The Raj on TV

Abstract

If 1982 marked the beginning of the Raj revival phenomenon with the release of Attenborough’s Gandhi, 1984 could be regarded as the year of the empire striking back on British screens. Not only was A Passage to India being shown in cinemas, but the box-office hit, Spielberg’s US American production Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, set in India, was released in June the very same year. Lean’s extremely successful portrayal of India was paralleled by no less thriving literary adaptations of the imperial past on television. Not only were two serials on the British Raj broadcast at virtually the same time, but The Jewel in the Crown was broadcast first on ITV and immediately repeated a few days later on Channel 4 (Dyer, 1997: 187). In his article ‘Too Much of a Good Thing’, published in Broadcast on 20 January 1984, Patrick Stoddart complained about the ‘Raj indigestion’ caused by its omnipresence on television. As he says:

This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy The Far Pavilions or that I have already set my heart against Jewel — only that I wish we’d been given time to recover from one before having to cope with the next. ‘She should marry Ben Cross’, I hear myself muttering as Susan Wooldridge rejects Tim Piggot-Smith for the 15th time.

(1984: 20)