As an avid viewer of Masterpiece Theater throughout the '70s, the appearance of this highly-touted series was something of an event for me. Listening to Alistair Cooke describing the effects of the Granada production on the British television audience at the time, however, didn't help me overcome my almost immediate and subsequent thirteen-week-long disappointment. I found the location photography interesting, but the casting was almost invariably bad - for both male and female roles (surely something could've been done to improve on the choices of the female leads - always excepting the splendid Peggy Ashcroft, who I'd learned wished to make up for the short-shrift David Lean had made of Mrs. Moore in 'A Passage to India'). Forty years after the demise of the Raj, the series perhaps evoked a nostalgia for the lost empire to British audiences. To me it evoked tedium, especially since I had to endure all thirteen weeks of it before Masterpiece Theater aired something else.
Review of The Jewel in the Crown
