Beecham House - a very mixed bag

What with no new Once Upon a Time material to obsess over (though I try to make do with the existing 157 episodes), I have drifted back towards old interests - a good thing, I suppose, even if they sometimes feel like a poor replacement. For instance, I've finally caught up with some costume-drama viewing. Beecham House, which aired a while ago in the UK, takes place in late 18th-century India and has been marketed as the "Delhi Downton". It has an upstairs-downstairs set-up, featuring the upright English merchant John Beecham, his family and his Indian household. In the role of his mother, we see the excellent Lesley Nicol, best known as Mrs Patmore in Downton. Of course I had to have a look at it.

Is it worth bothering with, then? Hard to say. I think it all depends on whether there will be a second series. The first two episodes were really boring and the third one, though lighter, is still pretty thin. This surprised me, as Beecham House is the brain child of Gurinder Chadha, who wrote the screenplay for the funny and charming film Bend it Like Beckham. I also remember enjoying her Bride and Prejudice, an Indian take on the Pride and Prejudice story. Even if she's not the sole writer of the series, I did expect a little of the sparkle of Beckham to shine through. Instead, although the settings are sumptuous and the acting is good overall, the script for the three first episodes remains wooden, and the actors have a hard time breathing life into their one-dimensional characters. Beecham is impossibly noble, having walked away from the East India Company because they were... Generally Very Bad. He assures the Emperor (I confess I didn't know there was an Emperor of India at this time, so the series is mildly educational at least) that he thinks "India should be ruled by Indians". He takes the moral high ground on every issue, but for flimsy plot reasons neglects to reveal to his worried family and servants (and incipient love interest) until late in the day that the half-Indian son he's brought with him is legitimate and the mother dead. Because of his reticence, baby August is assumed to be a bastard by the household and two Indian beauties are each in turn suspected to be the mother. When asked point blank about it, Beecham only broods (yep, he's one of those brooding heroes). "Why would you want to marry the dullest man in Delhi?" Beecham's brother Daniel asks one of the ladies vying for John's affections. More than one reviewer has concurred with this view, and I must too.

For the last three episodes, however, things picked up. The characters gained some depth and sympathy, though there was still no spark between Tom Bateman's John Beecham and the English governess Margaret Osborne (Dakota Blue Richards), who were supposed to be interested in each other from the get go in spite of making pretty basic small talk at their first meeting. I'm currently watching Bateman as Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair, where he has the required chemistry with Olivia Cooke's Becky, and I liked Richards a lot as Police Officer Trewlove in Endeavour. But the romance between Beecham and Margaret is just too undernourished to fly.

All the same, stories have survived having a hopeless hero and a bland heroine before. Beecham House was moving in the right direction when the first series ended (with a cliffhanger, a strategy I do not approve of). There is room for further development of the characters, who are likeable in their sketchy way. I for one would be interested to know what Violet, a friend of the family who accompanied Mrs Beecham to India in the hope of bagging John, will do next in her endeavours to find a husband. All the downstairs characters could do with more screen time. Elsewhere, Grégory Fitoussi's scowling French General Castillon is pretty fun, especially as it turns out that, though an antagonist, he's not really a villain. You see, he too thinks that India should be ruled by Indians - with maybe just a little help from the French. Then there's Marc Warren as Captain Parker, who isn't given much to work with but who is still Marc Warren.

If there is a second series, I'll be checking it out, but I won't feel obliged to watch it until the end if the quality drops. If you haven't already seen Beecham House, I would recommend you to wait until we know if there is to be a second series. The six existing episodes alone are not necessarily worth investing time in on their own.