This is a very nicely done series, the kind that BBC 1 has a particular touch with. It's very candid and, as far as it's possible to judge, balanced. Impressive photography too.
Generally, this episode shows us the way that the first British settlers adjusted to the indigenous cultures. (They wound up ruling one quarter of the earth's population.) In India, the first visitors, around 1800, were representatives of the East India Company and they embraced in the Indian way of life. Imagine arriving at an oriental culture after having seen nothing more ornate than the stained glass window of your parish church. They went native. They smoked hookahs, wore turbans, married Indian wives, and sported the fulminating mustaches, which later led to the British military mustached.
Then things changed. Victorian England underwent a kind of Puritanical revolution and the new values were imposed on the easy tolerance in the colonies. The "Memsahibs" arrived from back home and a stricter caste system emerged. The life of the Brits in India was now formal, reserved, and "stuffy," as the narrator says. The British families withdrew to the hills where they lived in comfortable bungalows -- a Hindi word meaning a house built in the style of Bengal.
There follows a brief look at the Raffles Hotel or Cricket Club in Singapore. Then we examine the Scottish settlement of Fergus near Toronto, with its Edinburgh Road and Glenco Avenue. Alexander Fergus was one of the earliest Scottish settlers and entrepreneurs in Canada, and I suppose he's lent his name to a well-known psychiatric facility in Northern Minnesota -- Fergus Falls. At the clinic where I worked in Bemidji, the joke was that someone irretrievably mad was "4F" -- "fast freight to Fergus Falls." I had to work that in somehow. I still think it's amusing.
The settlement of Africa in the early 1900s involved some savagery on both sides. And, curiously, the particular colonies reflected the social status of the homeland. Kenya was for "toffs." You couldn't get in without a lot of cash. (See the feature film, "White Mischief.") Kenya -- pronounced Keen-ya by the visitors -- featured not so much bungalows but English mansions.
An admirable series with antique still photos melting into modern views of the same scene, talking heads, an intelligent historical synopsis, and the host, Jeremy Paxton, still asking awkward questions of his interviewees.
