Indian Summers (2015) s01e00 Episode Script
Behind the Scenes
1 Happy Days Are Here Again I can't speak as to why it's been so long since we've had big Indian dramas on British television.
They've tried.
I think, you know, the truth of the matter is, The Jewel In The Crown was a masterpiece that was shot 25 years ago.
And um You know, the reason we're doing this now is because our writer, Paul Rutman, had a particular take on that world that was very, very different and was unique.
Just the concept is just stellar, I think.
I've done quite a few period dramas by now, and I think this is the most intriguing concept, it's the most interesting period of time.
Fascinated by the period, by the writing.
The characters were so interesting, all of them.
He wanted to tell the story of how a nation ultimately got its independence from the British, as well as telling a personal story within that.
So, you know, I think it's sort of serendipity in a way.
Everything, I think, really stems from a writer's vision in television and a writer's passion.
And a writer having an original take on the world.
And that's what I think Paul Rutman has and has created in Indian Summers.
Happy days are here again The skies above are clear again Let us sing a song of cheer again Happy days are here again At the centre of the show there are two families, one Indian and one British.
The Whelans are our core British family.
And they're represented by Alice and Ralph, a brother and sister reunited together for the first time since childhood.
Their parents, as far as we understand it, are dead.
Ralph has a mother-figure in Cynthia, the lady who runs the Club and, if you like, a father-figure in the Viceroy.
The Dalals, on the other hand, are a Parsi family, who are just making do.
They're in India because they were born here, their family grew up here in Bombay.
In a way, they're a much more domestic environment for the show to go to.
We have the father and mother, Darius and Roshana, and they bring with them their three kids.
Because they're close-knit, Aafrin takes his family with him and they all live together in fairly huddled circumstances in the Indian bazaar.
They're, for me, a centre of warmth in the show, they're a more human more humorous place for us to visit.
In a way, I think they're a counterpoint to the Whelans, who have plenty of warmth but are also shot through with secrets.
- I am here to work.
- To work? And why are they here? To rule.
For me, one of the most interesting things is the British out here, out of their comfort zone, and trying to create Little England here and what was happening at that time politically.
The whole thing, I think, is the most fascinating thing.
Of course, within that, there are within it are the love affairs.
Of course, personal relationships are always fascinating.
But with this background it's very, very intense.
No You are on form tonight! It's putting that very British world of the 1920s, the 1930s onscreen, which we have seen in various But then putting it in this world, it's like lifting them and putting them on another planet.
They're so uncomfortable here, and they desperately cling onto the things that worked for them in England.
The first time I read the script, I remember being completely blown away by the scope.
That first shot, which is the train.
And the way Paul writes it.
The images that he clearly had in his head were so so vivid that I saw them as well.
We all had this conversation, actually, when we met for the first time, about how strong the storytelling was.
It's great when you get that kind of ambition married with really good writing.
Because often you get you get one without the other.
And I just felt with this, it was I read it and thought, "Yes, of course.
This is the time to tell this story.
" Ladies and gentlemen members andguests.
Welcome to our little club.
And welcome to the Sipi Fair.
- Hear hear.
- A wonderful thing it is, to be able to take pleasure in each other's cultures.
I think Cynthia is um is a character who um goes to the heart of the British experience in India.
On the one hand, she's a great she's like a figurehead for the Imperial experience.
But she's also ferocious, dark, as challenging and at times cruel as she is charismatic.
And as for the rest of you cheatsadulterers slaves of Empire Here to rule this great nation for another glorious six months.
- Absolutely.
- I want no moaning about my milk punch.
We knew that we needed an actress who would not lose the audience, who would take the audience with her into some fairly dark places.
And we were thrilled with the idea of trying to get Julie Walters to play that part, because we knew that she had that combination of charm and strength and ferocity that Cynthia needs.
So when she read the scripts and was willing to meet, I was absolutely beside myself with excitement.
The fact that she's come in and delivered in the way that she has has obviously been, I think, incredible for me, incredible for the show.
I think it's also fair to say she's been incredible for a lot of the younger actors as an example of the kind of commitment, the preparation she does and the power of delivery from take to take.
I certainly think that Cynthia is a very powerful person.
I mean, I think she has a Machiavellian personality.
And so she's going to control whatever environment she's in if she possibly can.
And she's also a great stickler for everything British.
Thank God this is only once a year.
Come on, let's get on with it.
So, 150 fruit scones, 150 plain scones, 150 rounds of sandwiches.
All in time for the Sipi Fair.
The challenge of recreating afternoon tea at Claridge's, only serving it in the Himalayas.
The thing that attracted me very much to the script is not just the period, which it does, I love that period in history, but is her extremely complex relationship with Ralph.
I mean, it's kind of mother-son, and it kind of isn't.
And it's very controlling and she lives through him, and it's just really, really interesting.
We've had, especially towards the end of it All through, I mean, in the very first episode, there's a scene where he throws her up against the wall, because she's trying to control him.
But she still comes out on top, as it were.
And that little scene made me want to do it, before I read anything else, that made me want to do it.
It was brilliantly written and it's very, very interesting.
You immediately go, "What are these two about?" It just draws you in.
And as it goes on you know, it gets more and more intense as their paths, the two of them slightly are pulling in different directions.
So it becomes more intense and more upsetting.
Yes, we've had a couple of huge scenes, Henry and I, together, and it's great that they're at the end.
Because we've grown to know one another as actors and grown to know our characters, we're more in tune with our characters.
They were amazing to do, because they're fabulously written and complex.
There is all sorts going on in them.
Meet fire with fire until Mr Gandhi and the rest of Congress are subdued.
Too strong? Because I rely on you to rein me in if I'm being too tiresome.
Not at all.
Fire with fire, just what they need.
With Ralph Whelan, I really wanted to write a charming, recognisable young Englishman, caught at a moment in history, who was um by his own lights, trying to do the right thing but is on the wrong side of history.
So he's a difficult character in that way, because he does and says things we don't like to hear, but it's important that he his good intentions, however far he strays from them, are always in our minds.
When we met Henry Lloyd Hughes, when he read for us, he has charm in spades.
He's a tremendously talented young actor, who can be emotional, funny, has a great internal energy to him, and was absolutely magnetic from the moment we first saw him read.
Well, there's an actress called Laura Carmichael, who is in Downton Abbey.
And I was doing a film and she was also doing the film, and she heard me read the lines.
I was really busy with the other film.
And she said, "I strongly urge you to put yourself on tape and send this tape.
" I was saying, "Yeah, Laura, no, I want to, I want to," and she was saying, "No, you have to do it.
" She kind of sat me down and we did it right there and then.
And as I was doing it, in the process I realised that It's a strange thing that happens where you feel the words sound good coming out your mouth.
Does that make sense? Obviously, it's a very, very interconnected plot.
So with all these things, you're finding out a little bit more about the character.
But right from the get-go, my impulse, it felt right.
It felt like a really interesting fit.
The closer I got, the more I liked.
And it's not always that way, it's not always that exact combination of as the layers reveal themselves, you go "Wow, that makes it more interesting.
That makes it something even more of a challenge and even more of a slightly complicated concoction.
" I didn't know what to expect the first time I met Henry.
And I'm very lucky that we get on as well as we do, because we've got so much to do together.
He is so enthusiastic about everything, which is great, because it's good to have someone like that with that energy on set.
- Well, that is good news.
- Do you have a name? Yes, sir.
I have the details with me right here.
Ripped By mstoll Well, yeah, I have so much to do onscreen with Nikesh.
It seemed preposterous not to spend as much time with him.
He was the only actor that I actually saw extensively before we even left, so I've had many, many hours getting to know him.
He's such a kind of amazingly capable hearty, thigh-slapping guy.
He's exactly the kind of person that you would want to go off and do any kind of adventure with, regardless of acting, you know what I mean? He's got um just like, bags of experience and intelligence and application.
Aafrin is a tough character to play.
Because unlike a lot of the British characters, he's less active.
He's someone who is just getting by and trying to do right by his family.
Things happen to him which are bigger than he can at first control.
And he acts in ways that he can't always understand at the time.
What Nikesh brings is a sensitivity and a gentleness, a diffidence which really feels right for Aafrin, and he's brought that character to life.
He gives him a warmth that really makes us, the viewer, want to go with him, want to follow him through a story that takes a lot of twists and turns.
No, it's a British club.
Please, I have to speak to the Private Secretary.
Stand down, Vinod.
That'll do.
Dalal? Letter, sir, awaiting your signature.
You found it, all right? Yes, sirin the end.
Alice Whelan's story is very tricky for an actress to play.
She's someone who, like a lot of her generation with that India experience, grew up in India, was sent home to boarding school at a very young age, home being England, had a horrible time, and has come running back to India in her 20s.
She's a character who doesn't know where she's from.
She doesn't know what home is, she doesn't know if she's based in England, in London, or in India.
But she has an idea that Simla is her home.
Jemima has a tremendous warmth.
As an actress, she brings a huge amount of emotion, of wit, of fluidity to her performance.
I think she's a character, with Jemima, who we can fall in love with.
I think there's something about the fact Jemima is an Englishwoman who grew up in Paris that perhaps gives her a certain otherness, a certain statelessness, she doesn't know quite where she's from.
And it's possible that she carries a little of that into her performance.
So more than anyone who read for us, she seemed to just put her finger on that statelessness of Alice, that sense of "Where do I come from?" But she also has that tremendous warmth, and heart, which I think is absolutely critical to get Alice right.
And what brings you to the summer capital? Oh, just visiting.
It's not quite decided yet.
And will little man's papa be joining you? I'm sorry? Some dashing young subaltern.
I can just see it with your figure.
If you'll excuse me.
Look.
She left her hat.
When Alice arrives, the wonderful Jemima West, it is a huge new opportunity for Sarah to make a new friend, but also to get into the society that she really wants to be in.
Not just because she wants to be higher than she is, but also because she wants to be at the parties, she wants to go to the balls, she wants to be part of the community.
You know, I have a fancy you and I are going to be the very best of friends.
Don't you think? Sarah doesn't work out She doesn't really understand what's coming back at her.
She does believe that there's a friendship there with herself and Alice.
She thinks that From the initial meeting when she's not quite sure who she is, and she's interested to see where the baby's come from, to realising who she is The first few conversations are possibly terrifying from Alice's point of view, but from Sarah's point of view it's actually forging a friendship.
And deciding this person is going to be her friend is enough for Sarah, because she doesn't really have friends, doesn't really know how to go about it.
And it changes her whole dynamic, because all of a sudden, there is a friend in this friendless world.
Oh, my.
Don't look.
The poor thing's come out without a pair of gloves to call her Are you all right? You look white as a sheet.
That woman is wearing my dress.
Excuse me.
- Excuse me, where did you get that? - Oh, Christ.
She must have given it to the dhobi for washing.
What? They have a little habit of sub-letting the best outfits for the weekend.
Get your hands off! Ah, dinner.
How jolly.
Yeah, me and Olivia.
It's always a risk when you first meet other actors what the chemistry is gonna be like, how you're gonna get on.
Thankfully, me and Olivia seemed to get on like a house on fire, off camera as well.
She makes me laugh, and I hope I think I make her laugh.
She certainly seems to laugh at the silly stupid stuff I'm saying half the time.
There is a special thing between Whether that's because we're playing brother and sister there's a deeper bond between us anyway.
My sister, Madeleine.
God knows, we don't get to choose our families! - Where are we going? - It's the first night of the season.
The Club, where else? - Alice, I'm Madeleine.
It's - Yes.
She knows.
You are even prettier than he said.
Who? Well, your brother, of course.
I think this has got to feel like one of her last chances.
And I think that's why she puts so much energy into it.
And gives him so many chances, because he's You know, he's not an easy nut to crack, essentially.
So, Igot your note.
I was beginning to think you'd never ask.
I think to give the story energy, I think it needs to be that, you know, she feels that this might be her last chance of you know, avoiding you know, singledom and spinsterhood, which, you know, had a real She's meant to be sort of lying about her age already.
You know, I think she's sort of playing on hopefully her more youthful looks to try and snare someone before things droop.
I believe it's calledthe Grizzly Bear.
Really? They still do that? They do in this antique land.
They're doing it all wrong.
Hey.
What? No self pity.
Cardinal sin, remember.
I remember.
On your feet, sailor.
Excuse me, I'm in the middle of a game.
It's a dance called the Grizzly Bear.
So step, hop, skip, hop, and back.
And then I go Grr! This is all for your benefit.
You do see that, don't you? One of the strange things about Empire was actually there were quite a lot of Scots who came out, a lot of Irish who came out, a lot of Welsh who came out.
And you could almost say, and I guess I'm trying to say, that, you know, one of the things that kept the Union together, one of the things that kept Britain together, was this idea of Empire, that actually, a young Scotsman could go out and make something of himself in India or Burma.
"Armitage".
Look, that's me.
You're in tea? Oh, well, I am now.
It's my uncle's business.
Your uncle? Stafford Armitage? Aye! Do you know him? I guess when Ian gets there, he's bright eyed and bushy tailed, wants to get to know the British establishment inside and out.
So he comes across everyone.
The first episode, basically, he's trying to find his uncle.
He really is the most excellent fellow - mostly in the morning between the hours of 9.
00 and 11.
00.
Oh, Christ.
Ralph kind of takes him under his wing a little bit when he finds out he's a good rider.
Ian's a brilliant horse rider, there's a tent-pegging scene which Ian actually wins.
I think that sort of propels him into the Club, more than just, "Who's this guy?" sort of thing.
He becomes part of the scene and has a little drink and a bit of a party in there.
Also, because Cynthia, Julie Walters' character, is quite fond of Stafford Armitage, lan's uncle, she kind of takes him under her wing as the story goes on as well.
She wants to sort of teach him the ropes of how to act in India.
But Ian kind of wasn't expecting to be told to act in the way that he is expected to as a British person.
He starts to rub up against that.
I think that's when there's the tipping point for Ian, there's the person that he wanted to be in India and the person that he kind of wants to be after he realises the reality of it.
Imperial India, British India, had many aspects.
Sure, there was the political side, but there was also the business side.
A lot of people went out there and made money on the railways or in jute or cotton, or growing tea.
And I think it's interesting to have a story in the mix about a Scotsman who tries to run a business and who finds himself in conflict with a local Indian businessman.
And in many ways, that's an omen of things to come.
- It's even better than you said in your letters.
- Well, I'm not one to brag.
And this land is all yours? No, no.
Other fella owns this stretch.
Was he at the Club? Good God, I should hope not, no.
No, he's a local chap, but Local? Native.
Really? They can do that? Oh, they do as they please, nowadays.
The Dalal parents, Darius and Roshana, we've got Roshan Seth playing Darius and Lillete Dubey is playing Roshana.
And they're two wonderful actors from India.
Lillete lives in Mumbai and Roshan's coming from New Delhi.
For all of us, and for me, it felt important that we have Indian actors, not just British Asians in the mix, not just Malaysian Indians in the mix, to ground the show, to give it authenticity.
And they've certainly brought that, I think they bring a reality and a warmth of feeling to that Indian family.
As soon as we step into their home, this is a family and a house we can believe in.
I think a lot of it is because of what they bring to that.
Anyway, there's no point unpacking everything when we don't know what's happening, huh? Just because a few Britishers are afraid of the sun, why we all have to march up to the top of the hill like the Grand Old Duke of York? - Because your brother - I don't need you to defend me.
Your brother, the esteemed Junior Clerk, is compelled to come.
- He should say no.
- Then what? Huh? Your mummy is too old to beg in the street.
Your sister is too pretty.
- And - And your daddy is too blind.
So funny.
So my character's a bit of a geek, she's always reading a book.
She's kind of always sitting in a corner somewhere, she kind of just gets in the way a bit of everyone.
And my brothers and sisters are always running around everywhere, my mum's always cooking.
We're all just really busy doing different things.
When I set about trying to write an Indian family at first, I thought a lot about who they should be and what cultural background they should come from.
And it struck me that the Parsis are a very interesting community, particularly at that point.
They're a community that did very well under the British, they were a small community even then.
And they had very ambivalent feelings about the British.
On the one hand, there were some quite powerful pro-independence figures amongst them.
On the other hand, they were fearful of what would happen to them once the British left.
And they felt the British were a sheltering presence.
There's a feeling of elegy about the show, a feeling of something dying.
And the Whelans, as a family, are afraid for their future.
And when I look at the Parsis, I think I'm right in saying they can no longer even be classed as a community in India, because their numbers have dropped off, they're now considered a tribe.
And in a sense, they're a community that is if not quite dying, then endangered.
So in a way, I think the Dalals and the Whelans are two families who are fighting for their future, they're fighting for their lives.
They have more in common with each other than they realise.
And I think they both have more complicated attitudes to the politics of the day than might at first appear.
Also, the Parsis spoke English, which is quite useful for us.
And it just seemed an opportunity to kind of shine a spotlight on this slightly underexplored part of India.
This is it! This is it! This is what? This is it in action - the British sense of fair play.
Sometimes when we do our scenes, Roshan and I often feel that these lines are too clean.
Indians don't talk like that, they tend to talk over each other, overlap more, you know.
Which makes it real as well.
I know it's very difficult for the sound people, but it's how they talk.
They don't wait, they're not polite like the English.
They wouldn't wait for someone to complete.
If you have something to say, you say it over.
I really like the representation.
Because I think they're very real, and they have their foibles and Darius has his weaknesses, you know, for the English.
She's very naive, doesn't know much, because that's how she would be.
And yet she's a very strong-minded woman, within the confines of her home.
She's a little naive which makes her very endearing but she's also very much the woman of the house and she controls things as well as her husband - I like that.
You know, it's a lovely mix.
It's a lovely mix of being rooted in where we are in our culture and yet you can see where these kids are gonna go.
We've let them We get upset when they're getting too independent, but we've allowed them, we've brought them up like that, which is how it should be, I think, how it is with even people today.
That makes it very contemporary, actually.
I really, really wanted this to look period, India-wise.
Which sounds ridiculous, but of course, today, India, like any other country, there is a huge proponent towards polyester, anything that's easy to wash and easy to dry.
Fortunately, India still has a thing called the khadi bandi, which is government run, which are basically workshops for villagers to sell their wares.
So we're talking about hand-loomed fabrics, which has been going on for a long time.
They are as near to what you would have got in the 1930s as you could now get today.
So, in fact, we imported most of the clothes from khadi bandi- all the traditional stuff which is dhotis and kurtas, and undershirts we imported those from Mumbai.
Thank God they still do them and it looks great.
The Indian women's stuff, we tended to find here in Penang.
And we were fortunate enough to find a shop that had old stock.
It had woodblock prints, a lot of cotton - I've kept away from the silks unless the people were very, very rich - which also have the added benefit of looking broken down the minute you put them on.
Just like the men's suits, which we've used The European men's suits, we've used natural fibres, so it's cottons and linens, again, to give you that crumpled look, because we know what it's like being in this humidity and this heat.
Your clothes look fabulous for five minutes after you step out of your front door and then for the rest of the day are hanging in rags.
I really wanted to get that across on this film.
I think and hope we've done it.
Where is she? Is that her, do you think? The Club, certainly, this is the one place where we see Cynthia's rule of iron, as far as dress code and general appearance.
So, having established the early-'30s look, the next thing was to make it look as though it was real.
Slightly more difficult was to make it look a little bit like most of it was made in India, which of course, it would have been.
Very few people had the money to import their clothing from Europe.
So that was a challenge, and in fact worked brilliantly well, simply because we managed to find the people here who could copy But of course, the copying, you always get a slight variation on the theme by copying, which is exactly what I wanted.
So, therefore, I think it looks very real.
So, the thing about the Club is that we have sundowners, if you like.
So during the day, anybody went to the Club and they wore normal day clothes.
In the evening, dress code was, if you had it, because this is what everybody did at home, you wore white tie.
And we're on a cusp here, because in fact, by 1936, dinner jackets were much more common.
Black tie, as opposed to white tie, brought in by the Prince of Wales particularly.
He was one of the first people to wear black tie when white tie was de rigeur and caused a scandal.
But of course, as these things always do, it filtered down through the market very quickly and everybody took it up as it was more comfortable - soft collars, still bloody bow ties, but soft collars.
Just easier clothing.
We talked about various various ways of making this level of smartness and uprightness, not looking starchy and not looking staid.
And it just so helps that, obviously Nic's a great designer, but also the '30s has such a kind of flamboyance, in a way.
You know, it's All of the clothes are making statements, that's what's great.
What's so great for costuming, is that you even in quite a stiff landscape, there is real You know, there's something debonair about all of the characters.
But particularly Ralph.
It was actually Anand who then took us into a further place, which was this concept of the black and the white.
And two worlds, and undulating between the two.
I haven't done my scenes in Indian costume yet, but I can't wait.
- Hungry? - I, er keep it to myself.
- You don't think much of the food at the Club? - No.
Except the Yorkshire pud.
Naturally.
Nic's amazing, and he had a very strong idea he was going to make everything out in Malaysia.
And so there is very much a sense, from the costume you see of the other characters, that's it's copied from vogue.
And so it doesn't have And I think that's how it would have looked at the time.
People would have ripped out pages from American and British publications and been like, "Please can you make this?" And Madeleine very much wasn't one of those characters.
Basically, there's We've sort of moved together kind of two images.
Because I think there's been a sort of image of Madeleine which Basically, I wanted her to be sort of I wanted her sexuality to be kind of expressed in the clothes, but I think, in my mind, I had her as slightly overly sexual, perhaps.
And what I love about what he's done, he's created her as incredibly elegant and quite strikingly American, I think, in quite a sort of modern way, hopefully.
I think in my first email to him, I was, like, "I just see her in pinks and beiges and her clothes all kind of falling off.
" It isn't actually what he's done, but I love what he's done.
It's more monochrome, it's more long lines which also shows, sort of, to a certain extent, how powerful she is.
Memsahib.
Everything is prepared.
So we had this difficult scenario where Cynthia is setting up the opening of the Club for the season.
Paul had written into the script that she is wearing a boiler suit, which is absolutely fine for period.
Not normally worn by women of her background, but there we are.
But a sensible thing to wear if you're cleaning up after a winter of mess at the Club where it hasn't been used.
But then, at the end of the scene, she has to open it up and step out of it, and underneath is an evening dress.
Well, that's not an easy thing to do.
But I did find an extraordinary, completely contemporary fabric here in Penang, which looks like beading.
It was a Deco pattern.
And it was made of 100 per cent synthetic.
And I designed the dress so that it was almost Grecian.
Therefore, it was just a lot of again, dropped waist but a lot of folded fabrics.
Because this fabric is plastic, it just falls into shape.
Bless her heart, Julie got it absolutely right.
She practised unzipping, stepping out of it, whipping it off and there she was in full evening dress.
And it looks wonderful.
Let's get on with it, then.
I think the challenge of the picture was not being reliant on hired goods.
It was knowing we had to produce every single garment on the series.
We only imported stiff collars, braces, men's suspenders the things you can't get here.
So the challenge for me, really, was getting the stuff done in time.
Because pretty soon after we started the first block, we were up here at The Crag doing evening wear.
And having big crowds.
It was actually a matter of producing the sheer quantity of costumes.
I haven't worked it out yet, but I know we've made over 500 costumes for this show.
Which is pretty amazing, and most of those were made in the first three months.
And all made by little workshops and individual people, not mass-made in factories.
I mean, that is England, if ever there was England.
The wisteria sort of climbing down the balcony into the veranda.
All that sort of thing, all part of that sort of Raj nostalgia.
I needed to find those quirky quirky buildings, you know, designed in the British style which really, really characterised the hill stations in India.
Malaysia shares very much the same colonial history as Britain, through very much the same period.
The buildings and the life and the atmosphere are incredibly similar.
You know, one of the great discoveries of Penang Hill, where we're filming a lot of this, was that up here, we've got a string of buildings which were built by the British during their Imperial days here, and which have been largely untouched.
We had some great finds, both in the Club, at The Crag Hotel, and also in Chotipool, which when we found it, was fairly run down, but the designer has restored it to real glory.
I think there is an uncanny resemblance between the architectural style of the locations that we're using in Chotipool, and the kind of things that were being built in Simla at the time.
You know, there was a lot of mock Tudor building, which Lutyens was very sniffy about, in Simla at the time.
But it has been caught in aspic here.
I think, you know, it's possible to say that there is nowhere else that quite delivers the atmosphere of the Hill Station in quite the way that we found here in Penang.
I was a little dubious about duplicating Simla here in Penang Hill.
But when I drove around, I said, "This could be a lane in Simla.
" Stop here, please.
The key locations that were always in my head when I was scouting around, that I knew that I had to find and that I wasn't gonna be able to build, because they required real scale, I suppose, were firstly the British club which is run by Julie Walters and in many ways is the sort of social centre of our show.
So that was always a really important location to me.
And when I came here, it was really sort of the most exciting day of the whole adventure.
It was covered in jungle, but it was clear that it was a spectacular location.
I recced Penang in October 2013, looking for a location, which Charlie had previously seen with Dan and Paul, the writer.
I discovered this fantastic sort of ex-hotel which we turned into the Club on the Hill, The Crag Hotel, which was really the turning point on the location recce, really.
We then thought we could actually do it in Penang, and then other pieces, other colonial houses on Penang Hill fell into place.
The first day I arrived here, and saw this location, up on Penang Hill I kind of imagined it when I got the script and was working on it before I came out and everything, but it's far more beautiful and it's stunning.
I just so helps.
It's very, very real, it's the real deal.
We haven't had anything like this for I don't know how long 30 years.
And then, it was a bit of location in India and the rest was done in a studio.
Here, we have this amazing location on Penang Hill, where you can People are gonna want to go and stay in that club when they see this, it's so divine.
You can see right through it out into the jungle.
It's just beautiful.
It's so important that it feels so real.
Half your job's done.
I walk through there and I feel like here I am, you know, the Royal Simla Club.
The second location where I knew we would require scale and I couldn't build was the Viceregal Lodge.
That building is very, very particular in Simla and unreproduceable.
But what I needed was a building of grandeur and scale and so the old Governor's mansion in George Town had exactly that and was built for exactly the same purpose as the Viceregal Lodge in Simla.
So although we'd got lots of English colonial buildings, what we hadn't got, really, was an Indian quarter in George Town, in Penang.
It was a not a concern, but you do find yourself wondering, "OK, how's that gonna work?" And that was completely dispelled the first time I walked on set.
Cos the first set that we were filming on was the bazaar, was the most "Indian" of our locations.
So we took a carpark which was at the back of the museum, which had some buildings on it, and created the Indian quarter, the Dalal house, and the bazaar and the markets and some streets and temples in that carpark.
I remember going on the set with Roshan and there's a particular bird - I think it's called the koel - there's a particular bird that starts singing.
And he went, "Oh, that's good.
That's the bird that wakes me up at home.
" And then he looked at the sound department and said, "You should get that.
" And that's when I thought, "OK, this is" Things like that - the art department can't plant the birds in the trees.
"We're onto something here.
" The bazaar is so - like I said - so controllable.
You have to think of the production.
It's so controllable and it's got the flavour.
It's got all the noise and the hustle and the bustle and the chaos of an Indian bazaar.
There's always things going on, like chickens running around.
Everyone's running all over the place.
It's chaotic, but controlled chaotic.
I kind of like it.
You almost wish that you could take every single person that's gonna watch it on telly and take them and just walk through the Indian quarter.
"This is not CGI.
You're staring at a goat's balls here.
" I mean, we've got It's a real sensory overload.
I feel very much like my house is on a very busy street with a lot of poky, nosey neighbours.
Like Mrs Gool.
- Bye-bye.
- Not yet.
Don't go yet.
I've made falooda.
The family home was just breath-taking.
I walked in and I kind of had a moment when I thought, "I think I'm about to cry at how beautiful this is.
" So there's a lot of kind of bustle, of informality, of people crashing in and out, which I think the directors have realised beautifully.
And that's a big contrast with what you find at Chotipool, the Whelans' home, which is much more formal, there are servants and everyone's a little bit more on their guard, a little bit more self-aware.
So, I think, yes, again, I think the houses and the atmosphere of the houses reflect on just the way those two different families function.
I think the critical thing about about shooting in real locations, is that one, we can get a movement in and out of buildings, and it's a very natural space for the actors to inhabit and really become these people.
And what I think it does is it gives the sense of real people living real lives in real places.
And the hope is that that will give the whole show the authenticity that we've been striving for.
I mean, it's a very It's a full-on, visceral experience.
I feel like I I'm really glad that we're somewhere that is this foreign to me.
Because that helps.
It helps cos it feels "other".
It doesn't feel like a studio on the edge of London.
a cordon sanitaire round the Indian quarter, and everyone is to remain indoors while officers conduct a search.
So, any paperwork for signing, now's your chance.
I remember doing that speech, where I've set up the cholera incident, and all these faces looking up at me and trying to make these clerks wake up.
Dozing in the heat.
It brought so much to that scene.
It's not the same if you're doing it with two guys in front of you.
It was a huge hall and loads of people.
I suppose, that's one of the fantastic things that the production have done.
Is just brought this scale.
So all of our imaginations - certainly in my case - have been expanded, you know.
It's richer, bigger than I could have thought of, when you're sitting at home in London, reading a script.
Locations I shoot at I don't ever really I'm in the middle of the jungle, in a big, beautiful stately house, or a big You know it would be exactly the same there, if we'd found locations in India.
They would look no different to this.
In fact, probably not as good.
This is more authentic.
I wondered why we were shooting in Malaysia and not in India, but I can see that this is absolutely perfect, because it's kind of untouched and it's the real thing.
And it must be hard to find that anywhere else.
And also it's great.
Being in Penang is fabulous.
I was a little concerned because I've spent many, many summer holidays I'm basically from Delhi, so Simla's very close.
And You know, it's very historical.
The summer capital was there for so many years.
So it was a little concern.
But once I came here and I saw That's the beauty of all these um colonial sort of outposts or towns.
A lot of them - especially like Penang, which is a little away - a lot of the architecture is preserved.
So um And, of course, I think the production has done a lot to restore and, you know, preserve a lot of the things.
In fact, to make it look good.
I think some of the buildings are nice, but I think that a lot of money was spent on restoring them as well, which is great for the country itself.
We've been filming in Suffolk House, which is the location for Viceregal Lodge.
And already it's very different to the bazaar, cos physically the bazaar set occupied a much smaller space.
Again, that's testament to the art department, what they managed to do with it.
But you really You know, you turn a corner and it's so tight, it's teeming with life.
But then, here, it opens out a lot more.
I think that's reflective again of what it was like to go up to the What it would have been like to go up to Viceregal Lodge and just suddenly see space.
And before this set, I've also been to the location where we were shooting Gorton Castle, which is kind of more of the I guess, the nuts and bolts of the civil service.
Slightly less polish and slightly more packed.
So, in a way, my journey here has been from home to my workplace at the start of the show, before the events of episode one really kick off.
And then, suddenly, I'm a complete fish out of water in this place.
I think it's really nice to open up that space.
I think that will carry on when we get to other locations, like Chotipool and The Crag, where Cynthia's clubhouse is.
Chotipool was, in a way, the most difficult location to find.
Chotipool is Ralph and Alice's house.
It provides the sort of emotional centre of the house.
It's a sort of Eden, a fantasy and was the last location that we found.
We had You know, we almost landed on buildings that, you know, on reflection, weren't quite right.
They either had the scale but they didn't have the romance or they had extraordinary interiors but were un-shootable in, and right at the last moment, I was taken to a house that we had to fight through jungle to get to, that had been uninhabited, I think, probably for about 20 or 30 years.
It was completely overgrown.
Pretty inaccessible.
And I was shown it by the designer, Rob Harris, with a pretty heavy heart.
I was It seemed to me fairly clear he didn't want me to choose it.
So um However, after about two or three hours' thought, we sort of went back and both of us looked at it, and looked at each other - and you were with me, Dan, as well - and it became apparent that with a lot of work and a lot of clearing and renovation, that actually it was the perfect location.
It was isolated.
It was romantic.
It was on the top of a hill.
And that we should be ambitious and choose it, despite all the logistical difficulties and design difficulties that it was going to throw at us.
And I think it was the right decision.
Going up to Chotipool and granted we were still at a stage where the flowerbeds were being dug for the first time, to create something that had never been made before and it took my breath away, just the enormity of what was going on.
I mean, the same with the Club as well.
I mean, it's a whole complex of beautiful old buildings that have been taken and elevated to a level which is, like, almost beyond what they were when they were first built.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
An absolutely extraordinary undertaking.
And to think, at any stage when we're down here, attempting something, somewhere up there, you know, they're erecting a chandelier or doing some huge undertaking.
It's extraordinary, just the scale and detail of all of this.
And the challenge is to to, you know, to make the level of commitment of the performances match that.
I loved Paul's writing when I first read it.
I loved I had the first three episodes, I think, came.
And I just found it It's fascinating.
And it's the kind of writing that comes in and goes out, rather than, "How do I make this work?" You know? And very real.
And easy to make conversational, which is really important.
Paul's writing was vivid and funny and dark.
And all of the characters had something to say.
And none of them shied away from being interesting.
It's difficult, with so many characters, to make them all rounded, to have them well edged, have their own graphs, their own stories, which are, of course, all interconnected.
But to do that is not easy.
Everything is in Paul Rutman's head, is what I realised when we I remember Aysha and I asking him a question about a plot thread that We'd only read up to a certain point and there was a plot thread dangling.
I don't want to give it away.
But we asked him, "What happens with this thing?" And he just kind of looked and went, "Ooh, what do you think happens with this thing?" And then he told us and it was completely brilliant and nothing like what I would have expected.
I suppose one of the hard things for me feeling my way into the show, was to ask the question, you know "What were we doing there? What did we think we were doing there?" It strikes me as interesting that so many younger people have no notion of what the Empire was.
We've done a very good job of sweeping the entire Empire experience under the carpet.
I think, for my grandparents' generation, it was for many people, it was a huge part of their lives.
For thousands of people, it was an extraordinary, formative experience that touched them and changed them, and changed the sense of how they felt about themselves and how they felt about their country.
But we have done an extraordinary job of excising that from history.
God Save The King To the King Emperor! When you say When they call out "King Emperor", I mean, they didn't make Victoria emperor of you know, made her specifically Empress Of India, and it's a well, you know, the "jewel in the crown".
India was very much the possession that Britain was most proud of.
I suppose it's because the others - Canada, Australia - they sort of didn't feel like possessions.
They were part of us because the racial makeup of Australia and Canada was very much of the old, the kind of white British stock.
And India was this amazing clash of cultures.
And a synthesis of cultures, it has to be said.
It wasn't It wasn't always harmonious and often it was very violent.
But it is, at the very least, an extraordinary synthesis, which was You know, we had made our mark on India, for good or ill.
On the left, people feel it's a shameful episode that we have to castigate ourselves over.
On the right, people feel, I think, a sneaking pride for the work that we did there.
For the fact that this tiny island was capable of ruling half the world.
I think there's a middle point, which we've tried to course.
Which is simply to ask, on a very human level, "What did we think we were doing there?" "What did we think we were doing in India?" "What did our grandparents imagine we were getting up to?" Hello, love.
So many people of that generation, when I talk to them about what I'm doing, the first thing they say is, "We did a lot of good.
We did a lot of good out there.
" And I think there is a rather kind of defensive, rather vulnerable, story about good intentions about disastrous blunders and about an improvised, constantly changing effort to stay on, to stop this dream from ending.
Even after people back home in Britain had got rather tired of the Empire project, there was a cadre of people in India, and other countries, who were determined to hang on to a life that they loved, to a home that they loved, and couldn't imagine any other way of living.
And, in a way, Indian Summers is the story of a group of people trying not to let go of a home that they'd grown up with.
As you may have heard, this year's summer administration got off to a bumpy start.
The man who tried to shoot you.
Do they know his name? As I said, the man won't speak.
Lucky for you, him bumping into that bullet.
Yes.
Not so lucky for him.
A man tried to kill you.
We know not why.
And now Mr Dalal and I are required to cover something up.
So, this summer, we have to show the world we're committed to reform.
One day, who knows, Indians might be raised up to run their own affairs.
- King Emperor.
- King Emperor.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sipi Fair.
- No entry into the interior.
- I have double-locked the doors.
I find myself, this morning, wondering if you'd ever had any interest - in joining the higher ranks of the civil service.
- Head Clerk? There was an incident.
Yesterday.
We demand full independence! My sister, Sooni, she was arrested.
- Jai Hind! - No, you can't do that! This is how it is.
One thing is given to you, and another one is taken away.
Wake up, Aafrin! Look at the role you've been cast in! Marvellous Mr Dalal who threw himself into the path of a bullet! Esteemed servant of the Empire.
Loyal Indian of the Hills.
- Wake up, Aafrin! - Sooni! I will get you out, I promise! I won't be taken for a fool.
If that's what you think is happening, then you're very much mistaken.
What if I want you to myself? He's in love.
And so are you.
I thought you'd be pleased.
I thought you'd be pleased to see me.
I have heard of British men who take Indian wives, but never the other way round.
What are your intentions? Because Madeleine is a high prize! All these people.
What about them? Do you even know them? You came! It's my house.
All I ask is that our son should live the life that is for him.
You're all I've got.
Yes, I am.
Shall we? Ripped By mstoll
They've tried.
I think, you know, the truth of the matter is, The Jewel In The Crown was a masterpiece that was shot 25 years ago.
And um You know, the reason we're doing this now is because our writer, Paul Rutman, had a particular take on that world that was very, very different and was unique.
Just the concept is just stellar, I think.
I've done quite a few period dramas by now, and I think this is the most intriguing concept, it's the most interesting period of time.
Fascinated by the period, by the writing.
The characters were so interesting, all of them.
He wanted to tell the story of how a nation ultimately got its independence from the British, as well as telling a personal story within that.
So, you know, I think it's sort of serendipity in a way.
Everything, I think, really stems from a writer's vision in television and a writer's passion.
And a writer having an original take on the world.
And that's what I think Paul Rutman has and has created in Indian Summers.
Happy days are here again The skies above are clear again Let us sing a song of cheer again Happy days are here again At the centre of the show there are two families, one Indian and one British.
The Whelans are our core British family.
And they're represented by Alice and Ralph, a brother and sister reunited together for the first time since childhood.
Their parents, as far as we understand it, are dead.
Ralph has a mother-figure in Cynthia, the lady who runs the Club and, if you like, a father-figure in the Viceroy.
The Dalals, on the other hand, are a Parsi family, who are just making do.
They're in India because they were born here, their family grew up here in Bombay.
In a way, they're a much more domestic environment for the show to go to.
We have the father and mother, Darius and Roshana, and they bring with them their three kids.
Because they're close-knit, Aafrin takes his family with him and they all live together in fairly huddled circumstances in the Indian bazaar.
They're, for me, a centre of warmth in the show, they're a more human more humorous place for us to visit.
In a way, I think they're a counterpoint to the Whelans, who have plenty of warmth but are also shot through with secrets.
- I am here to work.
- To work? And why are they here? To rule.
For me, one of the most interesting things is the British out here, out of their comfort zone, and trying to create Little England here and what was happening at that time politically.
The whole thing, I think, is the most fascinating thing.
Of course, within that, there are within it are the love affairs.
Of course, personal relationships are always fascinating.
But with this background it's very, very intense.
No You are on form tonight! It's putting that very British world of the 1920s, the 1930s onscreen, which we have seen in various But then putting it in this world, it's like lifting them and putting them on another planet.
They're so uncomfortable here, and they desperately cling onto the things that worked for them in England.
The first time I read the script, I remember being completely blown away by the scope.
That first shot, which is the train.
And the way Paul writes it.
The images that he clearly had in his head were so so vivid that I saw them as well.
We all had this conversation, actually, when we met for the first time, about how strong the storytelling was.
It's great when you get that kind of ambition married with really good writing.
Because often you get you get one without the other.
And I just felt with this, it was I read it and thought, "Yes, of course.
This is the time to tell this story.
" Ladies and gentlemen members andguests.
Welcome to our little club.
And welcome to the Sipi Fair.
- Hear hear.
- A wonderful thing it is, to be able to take pleasure in each other's cultures.
I think Cynthia is um is a character who um goes to the heart of the British experience in India.
On the one hand, she's a great she's like a figurehead for the Imperial experience.
But she's also ferocious, dark, as challenging and at times cruel as she is charismatic.
And as for the rest of you cheatsadulterers slaves of Empire Here to rule this great nation for another glorious six months.
- Absolutely.
- I want no moaning about my milk punch.
We knew that we needed an actress who would not lose the audience, who would take the audience with her into some fairly dark places.
And we were thrilled with the idea of trying to get Julie Walters to play that part, because we knew that she had that combination of charm and strength and ferocity that Cynthia needs.
So when she read the scripts and was willing to meet, I was absolutely beside myself with excitement.
The fact that she's come in and delivered in the way that she has has obviously been, I think, incredible for me, incredible for the show.
I think it's also fair to say she's been incredible for a lot of the younger actors as an example of the kind of commitment, the preparation she does and the power of delivery from take to take.
I certainly think that Cynthia is a very powerful person.
I mean, I think she has a Machiavellian personality.
And so she's going to control whatever environment she's in if she possibly can.
And she's also a great stickler for everything British.
Thank God this is only once a year.
Come on, let's get on with it.
So, 150 fruit scones, 150 plain scones, 150 rounds of sandwiches.
All in time for the Sipi Fair.
The challenge of recreating afternoon tea at Claridge's, only serving it in the Himalayas.
The thing that attracted me very much to the script is not just the period, which it does, I love that period in history, but is her extremely complex relationship with Ralph.
I mean, it's kind of mother-son, and it kind of isn't.
And it's very controlling and she lives through him, and it's just really, really interesting.
We've had, especially towards the end of it All through, I mean, in the very first episode, there's a scene where he throws her up against the wall, because she's trying to control him.
But she still comes out on top, as it were.
And that little scene made me want to do it, before I read anything else, that made me want to do it.
It was brilliantly written and it's very, very interesting.
You immediately go, "What are these two about?" It just draws you in.
And as it goes on you know, it gets more and more intense as their paths, the two of them slightly are pulling in different directions.
So it becomes more intense and more upsetting.
Yes, we've had a couple of huge scenes, Henry and I, together, and it's great that they're at the end.
Because we've grown to know one another as actors and grown to know our characters, we're more in tune with our characters.
They were amazing to do, because they're fabulously written and complex.
There is all sorts going on in them.
Meet fire with fire until Mr Gandhi and the rest of Congress are subdued.
Too strong? Because I rely on you to rein me in if I'm being too tiresome.
Not at all.
Fire with fire, just what they need.
With Ralph Whelan, I really wanted to write a charming, recognisable young Englishman, caught at a moment in history, who was um by his own lights, trying to do the right thing but is on the wrong side of history.
So he's a difficult character in that way, because he does and says things we don't like to hear, but it's important that he his good intentions, however far he strays from them, are always in our minds.
When we met Henry Lloyd Hughes, when he read for us, he has charm in spades.
He's a tremendously talented young actor, who can be emotional, funny, has a great internal energy to him, and was absolutely magnetic from the moment we first saw him read.
Well, there's an actress called Laura Carmichael, who is in Downton Abbey.
And I was doing a film and she was also doing the film, and she heard me read the lines.
I was really busy with the other film.
And she said, "I strongly urge you to put yourself on tape and send this tape.
" I was saying, "Yeah, Laura, no, I want to, I want to," and she was saying, "No, you have to do it.
" She kind of sat me down and we did it right there and then.
And as I was doing it, in the process I realised that It's a strange thing that happens where you feel the words sound good coming out your mouth.
Does that make sense? Obviously, it's a very, very interconnected plot.
So with all these things, you're finding out a little bit more about the character.
But right from the get-go, my impulse, it felt right.
It felt like a really interesting fit.
The closer I got, the more I liked.
And it's not always that way, it's not always that exact combination of as the layers reveal themselves, you go "Wow, that makes it more interesting.
That makes it something even more of a challenge and even more of a slightly complicated concoction.
" I didn't know what to expect the first time I met Henry.
And I'm very lucky that we get on as well as we do, because we've got so much to do together.
He is so enthusiastic about everything, which is great, because it's good to have someone like that with that energy on set.
- Well, that is good news.
- Do you have a name? Yes, sir.
I have the details with me right here.
Ripped By mstoll Well, yeah, I have so much to do onscreen with Nikesh.
It seemed preposterous not to spend as much time with him.
He was the only actor that I actually saw extensively before we even left, so I've had many, many hours getting to know him.
He's such a kind of amazingly capable hearty, thigh-slapping guy.
He's exactly the kind of person that you would want to go off and do any kind of adventure with, regardless of acting, you know what I mean? He's got um just like, bags of experience and intelligence and application.
Aafrin is a tough character to play.
Because unlike a lot of the British characters, he's less active.
He's someone who is just getting by and trying to do right by his family.
Things happen to him which are bigger than he can at first control.
And he acts in ways that he can't always understand at the time.
What Nikesh brings is a sensitivity and a gentleness, a diffidence which really feels right for Aafrin, and he's brought that character to life.
He gives him a warmth that really makes us, the viewer, want to go with him, want to follow him through a story that takes a lot of twists and turns.
No, it's a British club.
Please, I have to speak to the Private Secretary.
Stand down, Vinod.
That'll do.
Dalal? Letter, sir, awaiting your signature.
You found it, all right? Yes, sirin the end.
Alice Whelan's story is very tricky for an actress to play.
She's someone who, like a lot of her generation with that India experience, grew up in India, was sent home to boarding school at a very young age, home being England, had a horrible time, and has come running back to India in her 20s.
She's a character who doesn't know where she's from.
She doesn't know what home is, she doesn't know if she's based in England, in London, or in India.
But she has an idea that Simla is her home.
Jemima has a tremendous warmth.
As an actress, she brings a huge amount of emotion, of wit, of fluidity to her performance.
I think she's a character, with Jemima, who we can fall in love with.
I think there's something about the fact Jemima is an Englishwoman who grew up in Paris that perhaps gives her a certain otherness, a certain statelessness, she doesn't know quite where she's from.
And it's possible that she carries a little of that into her performance.
So more than anyone who read for us, she seemed to just put her finger on that statelessness of Alice, that sense of "Where do I come from?" But she also has that tremendous warmth, and heart, which I think is absolutely critical to get Alice right.
And what brings you to the summer capital? Oh, just visiting.
It's not quite decided yet.
And will little man's papa be joining you? I'm sorry? Some dashing young subaltern.
I can just see it with your figure.
If you'll excuse me.
Look.
She left her hat.
When Alice arrives, the wonderful Jemima West, it is a huge new opportunity for Sarah to make a new friend, but also to get into the society that she really wants to be in.
Not just because she wants to be higher than she is, but also because she wants to be at the parties, she wants to go to the balls, she wants to be part of the community.
You know, I have a fancy you and I are going to be the very best of friends.
Don't you think? Sarah doesn't work out She doesn't really understand what's coming back at her.
She does believe that there's a friendship there with herself and Alice.
She thinks that From the initial meeting when she's not quite sure who she is, and she's interested to see where the baby's come from, to realising who she is The first few conversations are possibly terrifying from Alice's point of view, but from Sarah's point of view it's actually forging a friendship.
And deciding this person is going to be her friend is enough for Sarah, because she doesn't really have friends, doesn't really know how to go about it.
And it changes her whole dynamic, because all of a sudden, there is a friend in this friendless world.
Oh, my.
Don't look.
The poor thing's come out without a pair of gloves to call her Are you all right? You look white as a sheet.
That woman is wearing my dress.
Excuse me.
- Excuse me, where did you get that? - Oh, Christ.
She must have given it to the dhobi for washing.
What? They have a little habit of sub-letting the best outfits for the weekend.
Get your hands off! Ah, dinner.
How jolly.
Yeah, me and Olivia.
It's always a risk when you first meet other actors what the chemistry is gonna be like, how you're gonna get on.
Thankfully, me and Olivia seemed to get on like a house on fire, off camera as well.
She makes me laugh, and I hope I think I make her laugh.
She certainly seems to laugh at the silly stupid stuff I'm saying half the time.
There is a special thing between Whether that's because we're playing brother and sister there's a deeper bond between us anyway.
My sister, Madeleine.
God knows, we don't get to choose our families! - Where are we going? - It's the first night of the season.
The Club, where else? - Alice, I'm Madeleine.
It's - Yes.
She knows.
You are even prettier than he said.
Who? Well, your brother, of course.
I think this has got to feel like one of her last chances.
And I think that's why she puts so much energy into it.
And gives him so many chances, because he's You know, he's not an easy nut to crack, essentially.
So, Igot your note.
I was beginning to think you'd never ask.
I think to give the story energy, I think it needs to be that, you know, she feels that this might be her last chance of you know, avoiding you know, singledom and spinsterhood, which, you know, had a real She's meant to be sort of lying about her age already.
You know, I think she's sort of playing on hopefully her more youthful looks to try and snare someone before things droop.
I believe it's calledthe Grizzly Bear.
Really? They still do that? They do in this antique land.
They're doing it all wrong.
Hey.
What? No self pity.
Cardinal sin, remember.
I remember.
On your feet, sailor.
Excuse me, I'm in the middle of a game.
It's a dance called the Grizzly Bear.
So step, hop, skip, hop, and back.
And then I go Grr! This is all for your benefit.
You do see that, don't you? One of the strange things about Empire was actually there were quite a lot of Scots who came out, a lot of Irish who came out, a lot of Welsh who came out.
And you could almost say, and I guess I'm trying to say, that, you know, one of the things that kept the Union together, one of the things that kept Britain together, was this idea of Empire, that actually, a young Scotsman could go out and make something of himself in India or Burma.
"Armitage".
Look, that's me.
You're in tea? Oh, well, I am now.
It's my uncle's business.
Your uncle? Stafford Armitage? Aye! Do you know him? I guess when Ian gets there, he's bright eyed and bushy tailed, wants to get to know the British establishment inside and out.
So he comes across everyone.
The first episode, basically, he's trying to find his uncle.
He really is the most excellent fellow - mostly in the morning between the hours of 9.
00 and 11.
00.
Oh, Christ.
Ralph kind of takes him under his wing a little bit when he finds out he's a good rider.
Ian's a brilliant horse rider, there's a tent-pegging scene which Ian actually wins.
I think that sort of propels him into the Club, more than just, "Who's this guy?" sort of thing.
He becomes part of the scene and has a little drink and a bit of a party in there.
Also, because Cynthia, Julie Walters' character, is quite fond of Stafford Armitage, lan's uncle, she kind of takes him under her wing as the story goes on as well.
She wants to sort of teach him the ropes of how to act in India.
But Ian kind of wasn't expecting to be told to act in the way that he is expected to as a British person.
He starts to rub up against that.
I think that's when there's the tipping point for Ian, there's the person that he wanted to be in India and the person that he kind of wants to be after he realises the reality of it.
Imperial India, British India, had many aspects.
Sure, there was the political side, but there was also the business side.
A lot of people went out there and made money on the railways or in jute or cotton, or growing tea.
And I think it's interesting to have a story in the mix about a Scotsman who tries to run a business and who finds himself in conflict with a local Indian businessman.
And in many ways, that's an omen of things to come.
- It's even better than you said in your letters.
- Well, I'm not one to brag.
And this land is all yours? No, no.
Other fella owns this stretch.
Was he at the Club? Good God, I should hope not, no.
No, he's a local chap, but Local? Native.
Really? They can do that? Oh, they do as they please, nowadays.
The Dalal parents, Darius and Roshana, we've got Roshan Seth playing Darius and Lillete Dubey is playing Roshana.
And they're two wonderful actors from India.
Lillete lives in Mumbai and Roshan's coming from New Delhi.
For all of us, and for me, it felt important that we have Indian actors, not just British Asians in the mix, not just Malaysian Indians in the mix, to ground the show, to give it authenticity.
And they've certainly brought that, I think they bring a reality and a warmth of feeling to that Indian family.
As soon as we step into their home, this is a family and a house we can believe in.
I think a lot of it is because of what they bring to that.
Anyway, there's no point unpacking everything when we don't know what's happening, huh? Just because a few Britishers are afraid of the sun, why we all have to march up to the top of the hill like the Grand Old Duke of York? - Because your brother - I don't need you to defend me.
Your brother, the esteemed Junior Clerk, is compelled to come.
- He should say no.
- Then what? Huh? Your mummy is too old to beg in the street.
Your sister is too pretty.
- And - And your daddy is too blind.
So funny.
So my character's a bit of a geek, she's always reading a book.
She's kind of always sitting in a corner somewhere, she kind of just gets in the way a bit of everyone.
And my brothers and sisters are always running around everywhere, my mum's always cooking.
We're all just really busy doing different things.
When I set about trying to write an Indian family at first, I thought a lot about who they should be and what cultural background they should come from.
And it struck me that the Parsis are a very interesting community, particularly at that point.
They're a community that did very well under the British, they were a small community even then.
And they had very ambivalent feelings about the British.
On the one hand, there were some quite powerful pro-independence figures amongst them.
On the other hand, they were fearful of what would happen to them once the British left.
And they felt the British were a sheltering presence.
There's a feeling of elegy about the show, a feeling of something dying.
And the Whelans, as a family, are afraid for their future.
And when I look at the Parsis, I think I'm right in saying they can no longer even be classed as a community in India, because their numbers have dropped off, they're now considered a tribe.
And in a sense, they're a community that is if not quite dying, then endangered.
So in a way, I think the Dalals and the Whelans are two families who are fighting for their future, they're fighting for their lives.
They have more in common with each other than they realise.
And I think they both have more complicated attitudes to the politics of the day than might at first appear.
Also, the Parsis spoke English, which is quite useful for us.
And it just seemed an opportunity to kind of shine a spotlight on this slightly underexplored part of India.
This is it! This is it! This is what? This is it in action - the British sense of fair play.
Sometimes when we do our scenes, Roshan and I often feel that these lines are too clean.
Indians don't talk like that, they tend to talk over each other, overlap more, you know.
Which makes it real as well.
I know it's very difficult for the sound people, but it's how they talk.
They don't wait, they're not polite like the English.
They wouldn't wait for someone to complete.
If you have something to say, you say it over.
I really like the representation.
Because I think they're very real, and they have their foibles and Darius has his weaknesses, you know, for the English.
She's very naive, doesn't know much, because that's how she would be.
And yet she's a very strong-minded woman, within the confines of her home.
She's a little naive which makes her very endearing but she's also very much the woman of the house and she controls things as well as her husband - I like that.
You know, it's a lovely mix.
It's a lovely mix of being rooted in where we are in our culture and yet you can see where these kids are gonna go.
We've let them We get upset when they're getting too independent, but we've allowed them, we've brought them up like that, which is how it should be, I think, how it is with even people today.
That makes it very contemporary, actually.
I really, really wanted this to look period, India-wise.
Which sounds ridiculous, but of course, today, India, like any other country, there is a huge proponent towards polyester, anything that's easy to wash and easy to dry.
Fortunately, India still has a thing called the khadi bandi, which is government run, which are basically workshops for villagers to sell their wares.
So we're talking about hand-loomed fabrics, which has been going on for a long time.
They are as near to what you would have got in the 1930s as you could now get today.
So, in fact, we imported most of the clothes from khadi bandi- all the traditional stuff which is dhotis and kurtas, and undershirts we imported those from Mumbai.
Thank God they still do them and it looks great.
The Indian women's stuff, we tended to find here in Penang.
And we were fortunate enough to find a shop that had old stock.
It had woodblock prints, a lot of cotton - I've kept away from the silks unless the people were very, very rich - which also have the added benefit of looking broken down the minute you put them on.
Just like the men's suits, which we've used The European men's suits, we've used natural fibres, so it's cottons and linens, again, to give you that crumpled look, because we know what it's like being in this humidity and this heat.
Your clothes look fabulous for five minutes after you step out of your front door and then for the rest of the day are hanging in rags.
I really wanted to get that across on this film.
I think and hope we've done it.
Where is she? Is that her, do you think? The Club, certainly, this is the one place where we see Cynthia's rule of iron, as far as dress code and general appearance.
So, having established the early-'30s look, the next thing was to make it look as though it was real.
Slightly more difficult was to make it look a little bit like most of it was made in India, which of course, it would have been.
Very few people had the money to import their clothing from Europe.
So that was a challenge, and in fact worked brilliantly well, simply because we managed to find the people here who could copy But of course, the copying, you always get a slight variation on the theme by copying, which is exactly what I wanted.
So, therefore, I think it looks very real.
So, the thing about the Club is that we have sundowners, if you like.
So during the day, anybody went to the Club and they wore normal day clothes.
In the evening, dress code was, if you had it, because this is what everybody did at home, you wore white tie.
And we're on a cusp here, because in fact, by 1936, dinner jackets were much more common.
Black tie, as opposed to white tie, brought in by the Prince of Wales particularly.
He was one of the first people to wear black tie when white tie was de rigeur and caused a scandal.
But of course, as these things always do, it filtered down through the market very quickly and everybody took it up as it was more comfortable - soft collars, still bloody bow ties, but soft collars.
Just easier clothing.
We talked about various various ways of making this level of smartness and uprightness, not looking starchy and not looking staid.
And it just so helps that, obviously Nic's a great designer, but also the '30s has such a kind of flamboyance, in a way.
You know, it's All of the clothes are making statements, that's what's great.
What's so great for costuming, is that you even in quite a stiff landscape, there is real You know, there's something debonair about all of the characters.
But particularly Ralph.
It was actually Anand who then took us into a further place, which was this concept of the black and the white.
And two worlds, and undulating between the two.
I haven't done my scenes in Indian costume yet, but I can't wait.
- Hungry? - I, er keep it to myself.
- You don't think much of the food at the Club? - No.
Except the Yorkshire pud.
Naturally.
Nic's amazing, and he had a very strong idea he was going to make everything out in Malaysia.
And so there is very much a sense, from the costume you see of the other characters, that's it's copied from vogue.
And so it doesn't have And I think that's how it would have looked at the time.
People would have ripped out pages from American and British publications and been like, "Please can you make this?" And Madeleine very much wasn't one of those characters.
Basically, there's We've sort of moved together kind of two images.
Because I think there's been a sort of image of Madeleine which Basically, I wanted her to be sort of I wanted her sexuality to be kind of expressed in the clothes, but I think, in my mind, I had her as slightly overly sexual, perhaps.
And what I love about what he's done, he's created her as incredibly elegant and quite strikingly American, I think, in quite a sort of modern way, hopefully.
I think in my first email to him, I was, like, "I just see her in pinks and beiges and her clothes all kind of falling off.
" It isn't actually what he's done, but I love what he's done.
It's more monochrome, it's more long lines which also shows, sort of, to a certain extent, how powerful she is.
Memsahib.
Everything is prepared.
So we had this difficult scenario where Cynthia is setting up the opening of the Club for the season.
Paul had written into the script that she is wearing a boiler suit, which is absolutely fine for period.
Not normally worn by women of her background, but there we are.
But a sensible thing to wear if you're cleaning up after a winter of mess at the Club where it hasn't been used.
But then, at the end of the scene, she has to open it up and step out of it, and underneath is an evening dress.
Well, that's not an easy thing to do.
But I did find an extraordinary, completely contemporary fabric here in Penang, which looks like beading.
It was a Deco pattern.
And it was made of 100 per cent synthetic.
And I designed the dress so that it was almost Grecian.
Therefore, it was just a lot of again, dropped waist but a lot of folded fabrics.
Because this fabric is plastic, it just falls into shape.
Bless her heart, Julie got it absolutely right.
She practised unzipping, stepping out of it, whipping it off and there she was in full evening dress.
And it looks wonderful.
Let's get on with it, then.
I think the challenge of the picture was not being reliant on hired goods.
It was knowing we had to produce every single garment on the series.
We only imported stiff collars, braces, men's suspenders the things you can't get here.
So the challenge for me, really, was getting the stuff done in time.
Because pretty soon after we started the first block, we were up here at The Crag doing evening wear.
And having big crowds.
It was actually a matter of producing the sheer quantity of costumes.
I haven't worked it out yet, but I know we've made over 500 costumes for this show.
Which is pretty amazing, and most of those were made in the first three months.
And all made by little workshops and individual people, not mass-made in factories.
I mean, that is England, if ever there was England.
The wisteria sort of climbing down the balcony into the veranda.
All that sort of thing, all part of that sort of Raj nostalgia.
I needed to find those quirky quirky buildings, you know, designed in the British style which really, really characterised the hill stations in India.
Malaysia shares very much the same colonial history as Britain, through very much the same period.
The buildings and the life and the atmosphere are incredibly similar.
You know, one of the great discoveries of Penang Hill, where we're filming a lot of this, was that up here, we've got a string of buildings which were built by the British during their Imperial days here, and which have been largely untouched.
We had some great finds, both in the Club, at The Crag Hotel, and also in Chotipool, which when we found it, was fairly run down, but the designer has restored it to real glory.
I think there is an uncanny resemblance between the architectural style of the locations that we're using in Chotipool, and the kind of things that were being built in Simla at the time.
You know, there was a lot of mock Tudor building, which Lutyens was very sniffy about, in Simla at the time.
But it has been caught in aspic here.
I think, you know, it's possible to say that there is nowhere else that quite delivers the atmosphere of the Hill Station in quite the way that we found here in Penang.
I was a little dubious about duplicating Simla here in Penang Hill.
But when I drove around, I said, "This could be a lane in Simla.
" Stop here, please.
The key locations that were always in my head when I was scouting around, that I knew that I had to find and that I wasn't gonna be able to build, because they required real scale, I suppose, were firstly the British club which is run by Julie Walters and in many ways is the sort of social centre of our show.
So that was always a really important location to me.
And when I came here, it was really sort of the most exciting day of the whole adventure.
It was covered in jungle, but it was clear that it was a spectacular location.
I recced Penang in October 2013, looking for a location, which Charlie had previously seen with Dan and Paul, the writer.
I discovered this fantastic sort of ex-hotel which we turned into the Club on the Hill, The Crag Hotel, which was really the turning point on the location recce, really.
We then thought we could actually do it in Penang, and then other pieces, other colonial houses on Penang Hill fell into place.
The first day I arrived here, and saw this location, up on Penang Hill I kind of imagined it when I got the script and was working on it before I came out and everything, but it's far more beautiful and it's stunning.
I just so helps.
It's very, very real, it's the real deal.
We haven't had anything like this for I don't know how long 30 years.
And then, it was a bit of location in India and the rest was done in a studio.
Here, we have this amazing location on Penang Hill, where you can People are gonna want to go and stay in that club when they see this, it's so divine.
You can see right through it out into the jungle.
It's just beautiful.
It's so important that it feels so real.
Half your job's done.
I walk through there and I feel like here I am, you know, the Royal Simla Club.
The second location where I knew we would require scale and I couldn't build was the Viceregal Lodge.
That building is very, very particular in Simla and unreproduceable.
But what I needed was a building of grandeur and scale and so the old Governor's mansion in George Town had exactly that and was built for exactly the same purpose as the Viceregal Lodge in Simla.
So although we'd got lots of English colonial buildings, what we hadn't got, really, was an Indian quarter in George Town, in Penang.
It was a not a concern, but you do find yourself wondering, "OK, how's that gonna work?" And that was completely dispelled the first time I walked on set.
Cos the first set that we were filming on was the bazaar, was the most "Indian" of our locations.
So we took a carpark which was at the back of the museum, which had some buildings on it, and created the Indian quarter, the Dalal house, and the bazaar and the markets and some streets and temples in that carpark.
I remember going on the set with Roshan and there's a particular bird - I think it's called the koel - there's a particular bird that starts singing.
And he went, "Oh, that's good.
That's the bird that wakes me up at home.
" And then he looked at the sound department and said, "You should get that.
" And that's when I thought, "OK, this is" Things like that - the art department can't plant the birds in the trees.
"We're onto something here.
" The bazaar is so - like I said - so controllable.
You have to think of the production.
It's so controllable and it's got the flavour.
It's got all the noise and the hustle and the bustle and the chaos of an Indian bazaar.
There's always things going on, like chickens running around.
Everyone's running all over the place.
It's chaotic, but controlled chaotic.
I kind of like it.
You almost wish that you could take every single person that's gonna watch it on telly and take them and just walk through the Indian quarter.
"This is not CGI.
You're staring at a goat's balls here.
" I mean, we've got It's a real sensory overload.
I feel very much like my house is on a very busy street with a lot of poky, nosey neighbours.
Like Mrs Gool.
- Bye-bye.
- Not yet.
Don't go yet.
I've made falooda.
The family home was just breath-taking.
I walked in and I kind of had a moment when I thought, "I think I'm about to cry at how beautiful this is.
" So there's a lot of kind of bustle, of informality, of people crashing in and out, which I think the directors have realised beautifully.
And that's a big contrast with what you find at Chotipool, the Whelans' home, which is much more formal, there are servants and everyone's a little bit more on their guard, a little bit more self-aware.
So, I think, yes, again, I think the houses and the atmosphere of the houses reflect on just the way those two different families function.
I think the critical thing about about shooting in real locations, is that one, we can get a movement in and out of buildings, and it's a very natural space for the actors to inhabit and really become these people.
And what I think it does is it gives the sense of real people living real lives in real places.
And the hope is that that will give the whole show the authenticity that we've been striving for.
I mean, it's a very It's a full-on, visceral experience.
I feel like I I'm really glad that we're somewhere that is this foreign to me.
Because that helps.
It helps cos it feels "other".
It doesn't feel like a studio on the edge of London.
a cordon sanitaire round the Indian quarter, and everyone is to remain indoors while officers conduct a search.
So, any paperwork for signing, now's your chance.
I remember doing that speech, where I've set up the cholera incident, and all these faces looking up at me and trying to make these clerks wake up.
Dozing in the heat.
It brought so much to that scene.
It's not the same if you're doing it with two guys in front of you.
It was a huge hall and loads of people.
I suppose, that's one of the fantastic things that the production have done.
Is just brought this scale.
So all of our imaginations - certainly in my case - have been expanded, you know.
It's richer, bigger than I could have thought of, when you're sitting at home in London, reading a script.
Locations I shoot at I don't ever really I'm in the middle of the jungle, in a big, beautiful stately house, or a big You know it would be exactly the same there, if we'd found locations in India.
They would look no different to this.
In fact, probably not as good.
This is more authentic.
I wondered why we were shooting in Malaysia and not in India, but I can see that this is absolutely perfect, because it's kind of untouched and it's the real thing.
And it must be hard to find that anywhere else.
And also it's great.
Being in Penang is fabulous.
I was a little concerned because I've spent many, many summer holidays I'm basically from Delhi, so Simla's very close.
And You know, it's very historical.
The summer capital was there for so many years.
So it was a little concern.
But once I came here and I saw That's the beauty of all these um colonial sort of outposts or towns.
A lot of them - especially like Penang, which is a little away - a lot of the architecture is preserved.
So um And, of course, I think the production has done a lot to restore and, you know, preserve a lot of the things.
In fact, to make it look good.
I think some of the buildings are nice, but I think that a lot of money was spent on restoring them as well, which is great for the country itself.
We've been filming in Suffolk House, which is the location for Viceregal Lodge.
And already it's very different to the bazaar, cos physically the bazaar set occupied a much smaller space.
Again, that's testament to the art department, what they managed to do with it.
But you really You know, you turn a corner and it's so tight, it's teeming with life.
But then, here, it opens out a lot more.
I think that's reflective again of what it was like to go up to the What it would have been like to go up to Viceregal Lodge and just suddenly see space.
And before this set, I've also been to the location where we were shooting Gorton Castle, which is kind of more of the I guess, the nuts and bolts of the civil service.
Slightly less polish and slightly more packed.
So, in a way, my journey here has been from home to my workplace at the start of the show, before the events of episode one really kick off.
And then, suddenly, I'm a complete fish out of water in this place.
I think it's really nice to open up that space.
I think that will carry on when we get to other locations, like Chotipool and The Crag, where Cynthia's clubhouse is.
Chotipool was, in a way, the most difficult location to find.
Chotipool is Ralph and Alice's house.
It provides the sort of emotional centre of the house.
It's a sort of Eden, a fantasy and was the last location that we found.
We had You know, we almost landed on buildings that, you know, on reflection, weren't quite right.
They either had the scale but they didn't have the romance or they had extraordinary interiors but were un-shootable in, and right at the last moment, I was taken to a house that we had to fight through jungle to get to, that had been uninhabited, I think, probably for about 20 or 30 years.
It was completely overgrown.
Pretty inaccessible.
And I was shown it by the designer, Rob Harris, with a pretty heavy heart.
I was It seemed to me fairly clear he didn't want me to choose it.
So um However, after about two or three hours' thought, we sort of went back and both of us looked at it, and looked at each other - and you were with me, Dan, as well - and it became apparent that with a lot of work and a lot of clearing and renovation, that actually it was the perfect location.
It was isolated.
It was romantic.
It was on the top of a hill.
And that we should be ambitious and choose it, despite all the logistical difficulties and design difficulties that it was going to throw at us.
And I think it was the right decision.
Going up to Chotipool and granted we were still at a stage where the flowerbeds were being dug for the first time, to create something that had never been made before and it took my breath away, just the enormity of what was going on.
I mean, the same with the Club as well.
I mean, it's a whole complex of beautiful old buildings that have been taken and elevated to a level which is, like, almost beyond what they were when they were first built.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
An absolutely extraordinary undertaking.
And to think, at any stage when we're down here, attempting something, somewhere up there, you know, they're erecting a chandelier or doing some huge undertaking.
It's extraordinary, just the scale and detail of all of this.
And the challenge is to to, you know, to make the level of commitment of the performances match that.
I loved Paul's writing when I first read it.
I loved I had the first three episodes, I think, came.
And I just found it It's fascinating.
And it's the kind of writing that comes in and goes out, rather than, "How do I make this work?" You know? And very real.
And easy to make conversational, which is really important.
Paul's writing was vivid and funny and dark.
And all of the characters had something to say.
And none of them shied away from being interesting.
It's difficult, with so many characters, to make them all rounded, to have them well edged, have their own graphs, their own stories, which are, of course, all interconnected.
But to do that is not easy.
Everything is in Paul Rutman's head, is what I realised when we I remember Aysha and I asking him a question about a plot thread that We'd only read up to a certain point and there was a plot thread dangling.
I don't want to give it away.
But we asked him, "What happens with this thing?" And he just kind of looked and went, "Ooh, what do you think happens with this thing?" And then he told us and it was completely brilliant and nothing like what I would have expected.
I suppose one of the hard things for me feeling my way into the show, was to ask the question, you know "What were we doing there? What did we think we were doing there?" It strikes me as interesting that so many younger people have no notion of what the Empire was.
We've done a very good job of sweeping the entire Empire experience under the carpet.
I think, for my grandparents' generation, it was for many people, it was a huge part of their lives.
For thousands of people, it was an extraordinary, formative experience that touched them and changed them, and changed the sense of how they felt about themselves and how they felt about their country.
But we have done an extraordinary job of excising that from history.
God Save The King To the King Emperor! When you say When they call out "King Emperor", I mean, they didn't make Victoria emperor of you know, made her specifically Empress Of India, and it's a well, you know, the "jewel in the crown".
India was very much the possession that Britain was most proud of.
I suppose it's because the others - Canada, Australia - they sort of didn't feel like possessions.
They were part of us because the racial makeup of Australia and Canada was very much of the old, the kind of white British stock.
And India was this amazing clash of cultures.
And a synthesis of cultures, it has to be said.
It wasn't It wasn't always harmonious and often it was very violent.
But it is, at the very least, an extraordinary synthesis, which was You know, we had made our mark on India, for good or ill.
On the left, people feel it's a shameful episode that we have to castigate ourselves over.
On the right, people feel, I think, a sneaking pride for the work that we did there.
For the fact that this tiny island was capable of ruling half the world.
I think there's a middle point, which we've tried to course.
Which is simply to ask, on a very human level, "What did we think we were doing there?" "What did we think we were doing in India?" "What did our grandparents imagine we were getting up to?" Hello, love.
So many people of that generation, when I talk to them about what I'm doing, the first thing they say is, "We did a lot of good.
We did a lot of good out there.
" And I think there is a rather kind of defensive, rather vulnerable, story about good intentions about disastrous blunders and about an improvised, constantly changing effort to stay on, to stop this dream from ending.
Even after people back home in Britain had got rather tired of the Empire project, there was a cadre of people in India, and other countries, who were determined to hang on to a life that they loved, to a home that they loved, and couldn't imagine any other way of living.
And, in a way, Indian Summers is the story of a group of people trying not to let go of a home that they'd grown up with.
As you may have heard, this year's summer administration got off to a bumpy start.
The man who tried to shoot you.
Do they know his name? As I said, the man won't speak.
Lucky for you, him bumping into that bullet.
Yes.
Not so lucky for him.
A man tried to kill you.
We know not why.
And now Mr Dalal and I are required to cover something up.
So, this summer, we have to show the world we're committed to reform.
One day, who knows, Indians might be raised up to run their own affairs.
- King Emperor.
- King Emperor.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sipi Fair.
- No entry into the interior.
- I have double-locked the doors.
I find myself, this morning, wondering if you'd ever had any interest - in joining the higher ranks of the civil service.
- Head Clerk? There was an incident.
Yesterday.
We demand full independence! My sister, Sooni, she was arrested.
- Jai Hind! - No, you can't do that! This is how it is.
One thing is given to you, and another one is taken away.
Wake up, Aafrin! Look at the role you've been cast in! Marvellous Mr Dalal who threw himself into the path of a bullet! Esteemed servant of the Empire.
Loyal Indian of the Hills.
- Wake up, Aafrin! - Sooni! I will get you out, I promise! I won't be taken for a fool.
If that's what you think is happening, then you're very much mistaken.
What if I want you to myself? He's in love.
And so are you.
I thought you'd be pleased.
I thought you'd be pleased to see me.
I have heard of British men who take Indian wives, but never the other way round.
What are your intentions? Because Madeleine is a high prize! All these people.
What about them? Do you even know them? You came! It's my house.
All I ask is that our son should live the life that is for him.
You're all I've got.
Yes, I am.
Shall we? Ripped By mstoll