The Raj Quartet

John Derbyshire:

In the early weeks of 1984, for an hour each Tuesday and Sunday evening, a strange silence fell over England, or at any rate over the bourgeois precincts thereof. Streets were deserted; bartenders and waiters dozed idle at their stations; theaters and cinemas played to half-empty houses; telephones and doorbells went unanswered. The English middle classes were in front of their television sets, gripped by the first (Tuesdays) or repeat (Sundays) broadcasting of The Jewel in the Crown, in fourteen weekly episodes. I was living in the English Midlands myself at the time and recall the enthusiasm. It was, I think, the greatest success for a TV fiction miniseries since The Forsyte Saga seventeen years earlier.

The success was well deserved. The miniseries is now available on DVD, and I have recently watched it for comparison with these books. With due allowance for advances in TV production standards—especially sound recording—over this past twenty years, the TV adaptation is still excellent viewing. The casting is superb, drawing from the great mid-twentieth-century generations of British and Anglo- Indian actors. Peggy Ashcroft is there, and Eric Porter (a Forsyte veteran), and many younger performers, some of whom—Art Malik, Charles Dance, Geraldine James—were made famous by this production. This, one found oneself thinking, watching the miniseries, is what TV is for: the meticulous reproduction of good, long, middlebrow fiction. This justifies the medium, if anything can...