The Jewel In The Crown

1 9 8 4 (UK)
1 x 120 minute episode 
13 x 60 minute episodes

Jewel in the Crown was a fourteen-part serial produced by Granada Studios and first broadcast on British television in January 1984. A lavish prestige production, it received critical acclaim and won several national and international awards. 

Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet (four novels published between 1966 and 1975) the series focused on the final years of the British in India. Set against the backdrop of WWII, and using the rape of an English woman as its dramatic centre, Jewel in the Crown charted a moment of crisis and change in British national history.

The serial was produced during a moment of crisis and change in British life: mass unemployment, the arrival of new social and class configurations tied to emerging political and economic trends all conspired to destabilize and recast notions of national and cultural identity in the early 1980s. While often critical of Britain's past, this show permitted a nostalgic gaze back to a golden age, presenting a vision of Empire as something great and glorious. The show seemed to offer reassurance to the British public and proved immensely popular with TV viewers in the UK.

Jewel in the Crown managed to hold on to some of the formal complexity of the novels by employing voice-overs, flashbacks and newsreel inserts. 

By the third episode the serial's central character Daphne Manners was killed off and only one character spanned the whole fourteen episodes (the evil Ronald Merrick who dies in episode thirteen and only appears in the final part through flashback).