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SUNDAY NIGHTS ARE ABOUT TO GET STEAMY!
Hunks in breeches, tight corsets, lots of illicit romance – all set amid the richness and drama of India. No wonder the cast of spicy new series Beecham House say...
The smell of incense hits you as soon as you enter the cavernous stage at Ealing Studios. While it’s cold and wet outside, in here bright lights imitate the glare and stifling heat of India while the cast have Vaseline regularly applied to their faces to make them look like they’re glowing. A very realistic-looking papiermâché banyan tree towers over an ornate courtyard.
This is the set for Beecham House, a period drama with a difference. Yes it has fantastic costumes, romance, horses, family dynamics, downtrodden servants and snobbery aplenty. Yes there are Mr Darcy/ Poldark swoon moments, tight corsets and secrets and lies. But Beecham House also has all the richness and drama of India – and is based in a point of history, at the end of the 18th century, few of us know much about.
‘ I loved Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey and I grew up with The Jewel In The Crown, so I thought it was a good time to do my own version of those shows with a twist,’ says Gurinder Chadha, the Bend It Like Beckham creator who has produced, written and directed Beecham House. ‘It’s set in a different period to what we’re used to, and in a different country as well, but I always loved the interact ions between “upstairs” and “downstairs” in those period dramas, and all the political and cultural stuff that comes with that.
‘The relationship Britain has with India is strong, but we’re at a time now where we’re looking at history in a new way. People don’t necessarily have to take sides in this show, no one is wholly good or bad. The whole thing is complicated.’
Set in 1795, as Britain and France were vying for supremacy on the subcontinent, the series centres on John Beecham and his dysfunctional family. John, played by Tom Bateman, who made his name in The Tunnel in 2013 before cementing it as Dr Jekyll in 2015’s Jekyll And Hyde and Rawdon Crawley in last year’s Vanity Fair, is a former soldier with the British East India Company who left because he was so appalled by its profiteering and exploitation and now runs his own export business. We meet him as he moves into a palatial home on the outskirts of Delhi, an area that’s under the influence of the French East India Com
pany led by General Castillon, played by Gregory Fitoussi, the devilishly handsome window dresser Henri Leclair in Mr Selfridge. He does not take kindly to an Englishman arriving on his doorstep, and suspects John is a spy for the British East India Company.
John’s arrival also heralds the mystery at the heart of the six-part series – accompanying him is his baby son, who is half-Indian, and the baby’s beautiful Indian nanny Chanchal (Shriya Pilgaonkar). ‘John is this hard, stoic character and you don’t understand what motivates him at first,’ says Tom. ‘He’s a good man who is trying to do the right thing but he has lots of secrets. One of them is who the mother of his baby is.’
John is soon joined by his mother Henrietta from England. Played by Lesley Nicol (Mrs Patmore in Downton Abbey), she is appalled by what she finds when she arrives, leading to some uncomfortable but very funny scenes. ‘She’s not politically correct,’ says Lesley, with some understatement. ‘When she arrives in India, she’s thrown into a tizz because it’s all so scary. She’s not a bad woman but she’s ill-prepared for what awaits her. It’s a massive shock, all of it.’
Not least when she meets her grandson, who John hadn’t told her about. ‘She arrives in India to find John with a beard and a mixed-race child and she’s gobsmacked,’ says Lesley. ‘When she sees the child she says, “It looks native.” When she struggles to learn the names of the Indian servants, she gives them English ones. But as the series goes on you do see her being more affected by India; and trying to be more flexible.’
Henrietta is accompanied by a former soldier friend of John’s, Samuel Parker (Hustle star Marc Warren), as well as her 24-year- old companion Violet Woodhouse ( Bessie Carter), who has made her way to India to find a husband – ideally John. ‘She is a woman of her time,’ says Bessie, the daughter of our cover star Jim Carter and his wife Imelda Staunton. ‘Marriage is all her life is about; that’s her ambition. She arrives in India with hopes of John falling in love with her and getting married.’
But it is not only John’s mysterious baby that puts a spanner in the works for Violet. There’s also beautiful English governess Margaret Osborne, played by Dakota Blue Richards, working for the Indian aristocrat Murad Beg (Adil Ray) next door. She’s been abandoned in India by her
errant brother and is also a girl on the make. ‘She has a real sweetness and openness to her,’ says Dakota. ‘But she’s learned to be hardy.’
It’s not just John who finds himself in trouble. Now that she’s reunited with her eldest son, Henrietta demands John find his younger brother Daniel, who has also moved to India. Daniel, who still works for the British East India Company, has a festering resentment for his big brother. ‘ While John is morally impressive, Daniel is more prone to messing up,’ says Leo Suter, who plays him. ‘He drinks too much, he’s a womaniser. His father wasn’t in his life; he ended up being sent to Australia and Daniel has this sense of abandonment from both his father and John because his big brother left when he was still young.’
To further complicate an already complicated household, we then meet the imperious Indian aristocrat Chandrika ( Pallavi Sharda), who starts ordering everyone about when she arrives at the house to see the baby boy... could she be his mother?
Gurinder Chadha admits that she isn’t sure what people – and her family in particular – will think of how sexy the whole thing is; she admits that there’s more nakedness than she intended, with Tom having a Poldark-style topless scything scene within the first half hour. ‘I’m not comfortable seeing lots of sex on television and I will turn it off or fast forward it. When I wrote Beecham House it was pretty chaste. But once I started filming, it was a shock for me how sexy and sultry it all is. When I started shooting scenes with Tom and Leo and some of the female cast, the sexual chemistry between them was so potent that it became a very different show.
‘There’s one scene where John brings home his brother Daniel, who is recovering from a gunshot wound. He has his shirt off and as we were
‘It was a shock for me how sexy and sultry it all is’ GURINDER CHADHA
filming it suddenly all the women in the room were looking at each other as if to say, “Well, that’s a bonus”, because he is completely ripped. Now I call Leo “Mr Darcy”. There are plenty of Mr Darcy moments.’ She adds that while the sexiness of the show might seem modern, it’s still historically accurate. ‘That’s what was happening at the time,’ she says. ‘There were all these ambitious young men out there, often on their own, and then there were these beautiful women with bare bellies in their beautiful colours wafting around, so there was a lot of co-mingling.’
While many of the interiors were shot at Ealing Studios, the cast and crew decamped to India for six months filming in palaces and gardens in Rajasthan, Jaipur and even at the Taj Mahal. ‘It wasn’t easy to get permission to film there but I know the Indian prime minister so when I have any trouble, I show people a picture of me with him and I get doors opened,’ says Gurinder.
While the story is a fictional tale, it’s based on real history. Among the advisors were William Dalrymple, who has written a history of the time, and Shahrukh Husain, an expert in cultural traditions. ‘It’s history set before the history we really know about,’ says Leo. ‘It’s before the British East India Company really had its firm grip on India. The French are there and they have more control; that makes it interesting.’ Gurinder, who has planned three series, adds, ‘It’s set at a time when India was literally up for grabs. It was the end of the Mogul Empire and the British had a strong presence but only really as a trading company. The French were there too but at home in France there had been a revolution, so they were a bit rudderless. It’s an interesting period and hopefully we can go into more of it if we get to make more series.
‘I’m drawn to stories where I try to go against the grain of what you already think about that world and those people. My starting point is an Englishman who is good, who has some moral standing about what a lot of his fellow countrymen are doing. I felt that it was actually very modern; it’s something that British and American people are dealing with to this day. I hope to persuade people to look at history in a different way.’
Beecham House starts later this month on ITV.