#beechamhouse

Warning – contains spoilers

Trying to work out why Beecham House, ITV’s BIG drama that was meant to replace Downton Abbey at least in viewer size if not in exact tone, is doing so badly. A TON of publicity was thrown at it with the cast appearing on everything from The One Show to This Morning to BBC Breakfast as well as a features in newspapers and magazines. It’s the brainchild of Gurinda Chadha OBE who directed Bend it Like Beckham and the Viceroy’s House and is of Indian heritage, and the cast contains a mix of British and Indian actors some of whom will be familiar from other period dramas e.g. Tom Bateman (vanity fair), Leo Suter (Victoria) and Lesley Nichol (Downton Abbey)

Despite all this though, the opening episode only had 2.6 million viewers making it ITVs smallest 9pm Sunday drama premiere audience since 2015. Since then figures have dropped further with episode 3 dropping below 2 million. Why has it gone so horribly wrong? Yes its up against Gentleman Jack and you’d assume that the audience for the two shows would be very similar but that doesn’t explain the lack of catch up audience i.e. people watching on ITV hub

The sets are amazing, the costumes fantastic, the storyline has potential but it’s just not working.

I should say btw that Im enjoying it but possibly for the wrong reasons. Anyway my twopenneth on what’s going wrong

1.       John Beecham is very very dull. Sorry but he is. The entire show centres around him and his mysterious past and why he is the father of a mixed heritage baby. We should really care about John and what has happened to him but somehow we don’t. Possibly because the script is dire but also because he comes across as ‘earnest hipster who has been on a gap year trip to India and is now going to Indiasplain everything to everyone even the locals’. It was a mistake to try and sell Tom Bateman as the new Aiden Turner with a topless gardening scene because he just isn’t and bluntly you’ve also got Leo Suter there with HIS chest carved by angels. For some reason John is also striding around in an overcoat in the heat of Dehli and wearing Indiana Jones’ hat which is weird plus he also seems to be a bit dim. His best friend Samuel is so obviously a traitor, in fact we know he is, but dear old John cant see it even though his younger brother Daniel clocks it immediately. Which brings us on too

2.       Daniel Beecham is 100 times the more interesting brother. Daniel, as is telegraphed at us from space in the publicity what with the sprawling around, legs akimbo, grasping a hookah pipe as a penis substitute between his thighs photos, is meant to be the caddish contrast to the saintly John. Abandoned by John who left without a word, he’s fighting for the East India Company the series bad guys (where John was also a soldier). We meet him in a brothel and its obvious we’re meant to disapprove of him and yet..... He calls out his mother for her racism in changing the servants Indian names to English ones, points out the sensibleness of adopting Indian dress and customs while living there, cottons on immediately that Samuel is not to be trusted, has a fun relationship with Violet and offers to learn the sarod to please Chanchal the babies nursemaid who he wants to bang. The one area where he does fall down is with Chanchal who is as hot for him as he is for her but she wants love and marriage and he just sees her as a diversion until he goes back to the army. When he tells her this, she is of course devastated and he is called out by his mother for his behaviour in breaking her heart to which he replies he doesnt know what love is. Daniel is far more rounded and complex than John and we care more about him as a consequence plus lbr he’s hot af too.

3.       None of the Indian characters get a decent storyline. They float in and out of the story, a servant here, an ‘exotic’ princess there, a wholly enlightened next door neighbour but there’s no substance to any of them. Chandrika whose initial entrance we stanned totally as she took charge of baby August and ordered around the English women with an arched eyebrow of disdain has become ‘one of the three women fighting over John’ and just no. Chandrika doesn’t fight for a man people! She takes one if she wants and anyway they’d fight for her because she’s stunning. Chanchal is the only other Indian character with anything like a real storyline and its very predictable though Im still hoping that come the end of the series Daniel will ask her to marry him and she’ll tell him to shove it and go off with Baadal. For a drama that was sold as the British and India characters getting equal space and investment it really isn’t coming across that way at all.

4.       The miscasting of Lesley Nichol as John’s mother. She just isn’t good in the role and unfortunately her link to Downton was what ‘sold’ it to a lot pf people ‘oooh look Mrs Patmore goes upstairs’. Unfortunately it’s highlighting that in period dramas at least, she cant pull off middle class which is a shame.

5.       But the thing that is destroying it more than anything is the script. Oh dear lord its baaaaaaad. No cliché is left unsaid, no trope unused as the actors grapple with stilted dialogue and conversations breaking off where literally no one, NO ONE, would stop talking. Its not that they are talking in the language of the time, it’s a period drama you expect that, its just beyond clunky. The first two episodes were full of characters basically explaining the historical and political situation laughably shoehorned into conversation. A brief precis of text at the beginning of episode is all it would have taken “its 1795, The East India Company and the French are fighting each other and the rulers of India for its wealth. The East India Company are taking more and more territory while the French with turmoil raging in France are cut off from their chain of command and operating increasingly to their own rules. The Indian Princes do not trust the French or the British or each other”