rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (01/16/85)
Caning, anyone? Nasty Ronald Merrick (aka Timothy(?) Piggott-Smith) is available for house calls. Just turn on the tube to PBS Sunday (or Saturday for the instant replay) night, and receive a sound psychic thrashing from the saucy folks of Masterpiece Theater. What do net.motss readers think of the "villainous homo" glue of The Jewel in the Crown? Quite frankly, Piggott-Smith is the only Brit, male or female, in the entire production with any sex appeal, even though he's saddled with the often stupidly conceived & written role of Captain Merrick (how many ways can one portray obtuse malice?). (The erotic show-stealers are Art Malik's Hari Kumar, & perhaps Kasim & the nawab, the latter played by ??? Jaffrey.) Although I suspect the TV series is much better than Paul Scott's Raj Quartet tetralogy, a Canadian correspondent who may've seen some of the upcoming episodes tells me the homophobia only increases later on. Recent movies about India dwells almost solely on the British Raj & reactions to it (GANDHI, HEAT & DUST, A PASSAGE TO INDIA) & are often taken up solely with colonial preoccupations. India & Indians themselves are lost as a result. Now PBS adds a dash of that wonderful Victorian atavism, British homophobia, as if to emphasize the parochial aims of the Indian locale. The whole spate of books & films might well be labeled "Why did we (UK) lose India?" Ron Rizzo