Daily Mail

Joanna celebrates the Raj — and India doesn’t know what’s hit it

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Oh Calcutta! Daughter of the Raj Joanna Lumley was determined to voice some very un- PC thoughts, as she traced her family’s Indian roots and celebrated the British Empire’s legacy.

The idea that British rule improved countless millions of lives is almost never spoken aloud on TV. Every Raj costume drama, from The Jewel In The Crown to Indian Summers, is obliged to depict it as corrupt and craven.

But the Ab Fab star was having none of that on Joanna Lumley’s India ( ITV) as she visited the sprawling city where her greatgreat-grandfathe­r was born two centuries ago.

Nowadays it’s spelled ‘ Kolkata’, but Joanna insisted on pronouncin­g it the anglicised way, as she admired the city’s fading architectu­re and walked its broad pavements — left, naturally, by the British.

Even her guide was obliged to admit: ‘ People like my grandparen­ts look back on the British Raj as the days of order.’

Though Joanna was born in India, she cannot remember living there: her family were forced to leave their home forever when independen­ce and partition came in 1947.

She was far too polite to dwell on their eviction, but lost no opportu- nity to point out how hard her forebears had worked as diplomats and civil servants on India’s behalf. She was delighted as well to visit the former Governor’s Residence in Sikkim where her mother grew up, though the new regime was so prickly that officials forbade the crew to accompany her.

This wasn’t the only time the cameras missed out. When they filmed the himalayan backdrop to the erstwhile Lumley home, a mist came down and shrouded the mountains. And her elephant hunt on a plantation was nearly a washout, until a Jumbo family emerged briefly from the forest, to enjoy a meal of tea leaves.

The real problem was that indefatiga­ble traveller Joanna simply wouldn’t linger long enough in any one place to let the team get the shots they wanted.

She rocketed from the southern tip of the sub- continent to the Chinese border in the course of an hour, taking in jute mills, special effects movie studios, diamond merchants and temples, grabbing a bite of street food wherever she could. When the pace threat- ened to flag, a family friend on an ancient motorbike arrived to whisk her up a cliff road with 40 hairpin bends. he warned her to hang on tight — ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Joanna hooted, ‘I trained with The Avengers!’

Next week she heads for the west coast. Mumbai won’t know what’s hit it.

With a pint bottle of gin in one hand and a fag in the other, haydn Gwynne’s version of the Duchess of Cornwall on The Windsors ( C4) owes a debt to La Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous.

It’s a shame the script of this hit-and-miss royal satire lacks the discipline­d writing of that classic sitcom.

For every good line, there are two clunkers and some woeful slapstick. I suspect some of the best bits are ad-libbed by the cast. harry Enfield was marvellous as Prince Charles, pruning a pot plant and whispering ‘Sorry’ every time he trimmed a leaf.

But the writers don’t seem to know the difference between a running joke, and running a gag into the ground.

It was mildly amusing, the first two or three times that Meghan Markle (Kathryn Drysdale) told bewildered royals she was an actress in a U. S. TV show called Suits.

By the ninth time, the laugh had been bled dry.

The Windsors is less Ab Fab, more Absolutely Average.

POSITIVE SPIN OF THE NIGHT: ‘This is more decorative rather than damp,’ claimed buy-to-let mogul Prab, as he inspected mouldy walls in The Week The Landlords Moved In (BBC1). Listen chum, decor that grows is a health hazard.

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