The Making of The Jewel in the Crown

ENG 339
Spring 2003
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The Making of The Jewel in the Crown
The Masterpiece Theatre Series based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Granada Television. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
[ORBIS PN1992.77.J38M35 1984]
Short Cuts: Introduction | Gascoigne on "The Making..." | Works Cited | Resources

URL of this webpage: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htm

ø I am in process of improving this website with grateful acknowledgement to John Lennard, whose critical suggestions I plan to implement in Spring 2003.

Granada first screened the U.K. television serial adaptation of the Raj Quartet
from 3 Jan. to 3 April 1984, and was reputed to have attracted
more than eight million viewers.

"Introduction" (pp. 7-9), by Sir Denis Forman, Chairman of Granada Television

Could Paul Scott's Raj Quartet "be done on television?" (7)--without "betray[ing] the quality of the original work" (8). Forman recounts some of the challenges of adapting Scott's 4-novel epic successfully "into the form of a television series" (7):

	For TV, events had to be arranged "into chronological order, starting from the riots of 1942 and continuing until Guy Perron flew toward Delhi in the week of Independence in July 1947" (7). This task was "not simple" because in the novels, Scott "told and retold [some events] a second and third time"--indeed, central incidents like "the rape" of Daphne Manners are referenced repeatedly throughout the Raj Quartet, and each retelling offers "some new emphasis or a different interpretation" (7-8). SEE SPECIAL INSERT BELOW: SCREENWRITER KEN TAYLOR ON ADAPTING SCOTT'S RAJ QUARTET FOR TELEVISION!
	"There were excursions off the main track (notably the opening tragic story of Miss Crane)" (8).
	"There were a great number of direct references to the political scene" (8).
	"There were seven main geographical locations..." (8).
	"[W]orst of all, we lost our first hero and heroine, Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, just as they had aroused our interest and engaged our sympathy" (8).

The Granada Television film crew is assembled:

	Screenwriter: Ken Taylor's "scripts were the foundation upon which the Quartet had to stand," and they survived "all the stresses and strains of production and . . . final realization of The Jewel in the Crown" with surprisingly little deviation (8). SEE SPECIAL INSERT BELOW: SCREENWRITER KEN TAYLOR ON ADAPTING SCOTT'S RAJ QUARTET FOR TELEVISION!
	Director: "In 1980, Christopher Morahan decided...to devote three years of his life to the production of The Jewel in the Crown," bringing to the project "his strong feeling for the novels and his depth of experience in theatre and television" (8). Morahan directed 7 episodes of the 14 episodes and exercised "pervasive control" over the whole the entire enterprise--"...he is one of those unusual people equally suited to command an army corps in action or to direct actors in the most intimate scenes" (8). Morahan made "three trips to India, exploring dozens of locations," and conducted "hundreds of interviews" (8).
	Actors: "[A]ctors were eager to play some of the parts which they felt had belonged to them since they first read the novels," especially Tim Pigott-Smith who played Ronald Merrick and Peggy Ashcroft who played Barbie Batchelor (8). By 1982, the production team was filming in Mysore, India, "brown as berries, working from sunrise to sunset in a temperature of nearly 100 degrees Fahenheit. None were allergic to India and nearly all of them were in love with it" (8).

Forman writes in 1983, before the TV series was aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 1984:

"How truly will we have conveyed Paul Scott's original to the world? Will Hari Kumar, Ronald Merrick, Sarah Layton and Count Bronowsky become for viewers the real people that we know them to be . . .? Is our way of telling history good enough? Will we succeed in conveying Scott's uncanny insight into the psychology of the two principals in this great confrontation, the British and India?" (9).
Forman hopes that yes, "the series The Jewel in the Crown will do justice so far as television can to Paul Scott's Raj Quartet" (9).

SPECIAL INSERT: SCREENWRITER KEN TAYLOR
ON ADAPTING SCOTT'S RAJ QUARTET FOR TELEVISION

Screenwriter Ken Taylor has explained in a 22 November 2007 e-mail message to me:

"Having adapted novels by writers from Jane Austin and Rebecca West to Muriel Spark and Mary Wesley, I confess that Scott's quartet constituted the greatest challenge of my career. Its complex structure, historic echoes and reverberations would be exceptionally difficult to capture and translate to the television screen with its realism and immediacy. This was the problem presented by Scott's four volume non-chronological treatment of time since the necessary forward movement of the story might have robbed his work of all its subtlety and impact. The notion that arranging the events in chronological sequence would itself present any difficulty never once occurred to me - and I am surprised that anyone should believe for a moment that it could, since the elements of any story must of necessity flow as one leads to another. The terrible danger confronting me was that in unscrambling Scott's structure I might destroy the product of his genius.

"In the event I believe I largely succeeded by the use of recurrent images - such as the burning car and a piece of butterfly-patterned lace - with the ultimate help of brilliant direction, performances, music, and camera work."

Gascoigne, Bamber. "The Making of The Jewel in the Crown" (pp. 10-28)

The filming of The Jewel in the Crown television series began January, 1982, in Udaipur, India, with "an aged holy man turn[ing] up to bless the production," a ceremony without which no film in India's movie industry ever begins (10). Gasgoigne describes the fourteen-hour television saga as a story "of the love-hate relationship between Britain and India or, in terms of the traditional family themes of Indian films, a study of the final years of a forced marriage between the two countries followed by the agonies of divorce" (10-11). "Udaipur can make a strong claim to be the most beautiful city in India" (11). "A friendly group of a thousand spectators crowded in on every scene," and were exceedingly "cooperative, keeping quiet during every take and bursting into applause the moment Jim [O'Brien, who shared with Christopher Morahan the direction of the series] said 'Cut'" (13). India also worked its magic on Christopher Morahan, also "over Producer" of the series, during his first day of filming: he "felt overwhelmed by a desire to capture on film, in the service of Paul Scott's books, this extraordinarily rich, vivid, ancient culture and our [British] own alien reaction to it and influence upon it" (14-15). Later, Sir Denis Forman, who knows India and Paul Scott's novels well, who bought the rights to the Raj Quartet in 1978, and who had "long imagined each scene," reviewed the photography: "the very steps up which Daphne Manners would stumble after being raped in the Bibibhar Gardens, the Kashmiri houseboat in which her aunt [Lady Manners] would look after Daphne's baby, or the street in which Daphne's Indian lover [Hari Kumar] would live an impoverished and obscure life in contrast to his English public-school background" (15).

"Scott's novels require four radically different Indian locations, each of them a typical part of life during the Raj" (15): filming locations were Udaipur, Mysore, Simla, Kashmir. "Udaipur...provided some of the locations for Scott's Mayapore and Pankot, two towns with a strong British presence, both military and civil" (17), supplemented by Mysore, a city further to the south and...very much hotter" (17). Filming in Indian locations acclimatized cast and crew to Eastern "[b]ias against the taking of any form of life, combined with the heat of the climate" (17). When Morahan was asked for "his least prepossessing image of India he specified, without hesitation, the ceiling fans idly blowing air down towards the vast skyscrapers of documents on any official's desk, all reduced by time and inattention to a uniform shade of brown" (20).

Gascoigne judges Paul Scott's "missing presence" during the filming as a "tragedy" (28). Few readers knew the novels of the Raj Quartet when Scott was publishing them between 1966 and 1975. Only after Staying On, the sequel or 5th novel published in 1977, won the Booker Prize did a large number of readers discover and acclaim the earlier books making up the Raj Quartet. "Scott died in 1978 at the age of only fifty-seven and at the very moment when he was beginning to reach a wider audience" (28). Christopher Morahan "would have loved to have Paul Scott beside him on the series, to guide him through many difficult points of interpretation or intention" (28).

POSTSCRIPT (from Paul Scott & Jewel in the Crown):

The 15-hour [see Lennard] Granada television adaptation Jewel in the Crown tells the interlocked stories of the Raj Quartet in chronological order and achieves a fascinating dramatization by focusing on key “characters, the tensions between them and their developing situations. The historical context is brilliantly conveyed by newsreel clips so patently pro-British that they serve as a parodic commentary . . .” (Moore 211). But it is well to emphasize what is “largely lost in the process of adaptation”: “the texture of testimony, its intimation of character, the doubts about the truth and reality of observations” (Moore 211) central to the experience of reading Paul Scott’s novels.

Works Cited

The Jewel in the Crown. Dir. Christopher Morahan & Jim O'Brien. Granada Television, 1984. Broadcast in U.S.A. on PBS Masterpiece Theater; released by A & E Home Video, 2001 (8-videotape set, total runtime:750 min.). Not Rated.
Performers include Dame Peggy Ashcroft (as Barbie Batchelor) in her last major and very memorable role; and Tim Pigott-Smith (as Ronald Merrick) for which he won the BAFTA as Best TV Actor.
"The Jewel in the Crown" (1984). Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com), 2002.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0086739

The Making of The Jewel in the Crown: The Masterpiece Theatre Series based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Granada Television. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
[ORBIS PN1992.77.J38M35 1984]

Masterpiece Theatre (PBS Online): The Jewel in the Crown
Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet; 14 episodes originally broadcast in 1984.
"Episode 1: The Jewel in the Crown" (introduced by Alistair Cooke).
URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/76/76.html

Moore, Robin. Paul Scott's Raj. London: Heinemann, 1990.
[ORBIS PR6069.C596 R3435 1990]

Resources - [TO DO: Alphabetize & re-format!!]

Brandt, George W. "The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott - Ken Taylor): The Literary Serial; or the Art of Adaptation." British Television Drama in the 1980s. Ed. George W. Brandt. Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. 196-213. [ORBIS - PN 1992.65 .B682 1993 ]

Paul Scott & Jewel in the Crown
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/PaulScott.htm
Jewel in the Crown Study Guide Index
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/JewelSGtoc.htm

Film Adaptation of Literature & Movie Links - to be linked

McLuskie, Peter. "Jewel in the Crown: British Serial Drama."
URL: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/J/htmlJ/jewelinthe/jewelinthe.htm
Museum of Broadcast Communications: Encyclopedia of Television. (Bruce DuMont, Founder and President; Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago, IL.)
Root URL: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/
Pathway: J / Jewel in the Crown

"Queen Victoria's Empire." Empire: People and Passions that Changed the World (PBS Online, June 2001). Originally broadcast June 2001. [Cora has the video!]
http://www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/ (last accessed 4 April 2002).

Masterpiece Theatre (PBS Online): The Jewel in the Crown
Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet; 14 episodes originally broadcast in 1984.
"Episode 1: The Jewel in the Crown" (introduced by Alistair Cooke).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/76/76.html

India Timeline 3: The British Raj (late 17th - early 20th c.)
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/IndiaTML/indiatml3.htm
India Timeline 4: Independence of India & Pakistan (20th c)
& India Timeline Sources
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/IndiaTML/indiatml4.htm
part of Cora Agatucci's HUM 210 Asian Timelines of Literary & Cultural History - Table of Contents: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/asianTML.htm

Moore, Robin. Paul Scott's Raj. London: Heinemann, 1990.