Beecham House review: ITV’s clunky period drama is all tell and no show

ITV’s new six-part primetime period drama Beecham House is set in 18th-century Delhi. It has been pitched as a kind of Murghal Downton Abbey, but it feels more like Jane Austen’s Marigold Hotel, a spoof of itself so cheesy that it practically wafts off the screen.

In the cold open our hero (Tom Bateman) shoots someone holding up a coach. “Who are you, stranger?” asks a rescued man.

“John Beecham,” says John Beecham. Then he gets shot himself. The titles roll. We can’t say we weren’t warned.

The premise is fine. Three years after the shooting, it’s 1795 and Beecham, a former East India Company man, is trying to set up as a trader, under the wary eyes of the French commander (Gregory Fitoussi) and the local emperor Shah Alam (Roshan Seth). He arrives at a palatial new abode with a train of staff and mysterious babes. Everyone is suspicious of this British arrival, but Beecham swears he is legit.

We are clearly meant to take our hero, who seems to have raided Indiana Jones’s lost wardrobe, for a colonial beefcake. With his solid face and thick beard he looks rugged but smooth, like a hipster whose carpentry business is undermined by a massive trust fund. Sure, Beecham is taking the local natural resources and selling them to make himself rich, but he’s doing it with the right intentions.

He takes his top off, plays firm with the French general, impresses the servants with a bit of the local lingo. He thinks India should be ruled by Indians. He has a half-Indian baby of uncertain maternity. His own mother (Lesley Nicol) turns up with a scheming Englishwoman, Violet (Bessie Carter), with designs on becoming Mrs Beecham. To do so she’ll need to get rid of Margaret Osbourne (Dakota Blue Richards), who has a bit of a vibe with our man too.

The director is Gurinder Chadha, of Bend It Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice and sundry other British-Indian projects. In promotional interviews, she has described Beecham House as “flipping radical”. She is right in the sense that you don’t often see writing and acting this clunky, even on ITV. It’s all tell and no show. White-clad staff mutter to each other in the shadows. No hair is out of place, no speck of dust where it shouldn’t be, which lends the sets a kind of pornish lifelessness.

I accept that Beecham House is not aimed at me and not everything has to be Chernobyl. There is no shortage of extras and costumes or glamorous Indian location shoots. If you want to to watch elephants trundle around in fancy outfits while people unironically ask each other things like, “John Beecham: is he friend or foe?”, perhaps you’ll have a good time.

But while there is obviously a gap for more nuanced depictions of the British in India, an era invariably reduced to a series of lame cliches, this isn’t it. I’m afraid this Beecham’s will leave you... cold.