Locations & Sets

- [Chadha] Beecham House is set in Delhi, in 1795.

We are shooting in Jaipur, in Rajasthan, for Delhi, because it has so many magnificent buildings from the Mughal times, and that architecture really works well for Delhi 1795.

- [Singh] So we're in Jaigarh Fort, which is on the top of a hill.

This was the military fort, which guards the borders.

So if you look around, there'll be walls, like the Great Wall of China, running all around in the hills.

- [Ralph] We built and shot the interior set of Beecham House, in Ealing Studios.

It had the biggest studio we could get, so that we could get the biggest scale we can for the show.

- [Chadha] So what you could do, is leave the set at Ealing, and then just walk into here.

- Absolutely right.

- Walk onto here.

- Through here, into the right.

- Yeah, but we gotta believe that her room is just here.

- Yeah.

We had to develop a journey, and that journey had to be complicated enough for you to follow through the camera, geographically, cinematically, but also then arrive at India, coming out of a door or coming out of a corridor, or coming out of an architectural feature.

- [Notay] They did such a marvelous job on the set, at Ealing.

They really constructed something that felt very much like we were at Rajasthan.

- [Suter] There are columns in the set at Ealing, and then when you come here, you see exactly the same architecture, exactly the same paint work.

And they're worlds apart, literally.

- [Richards] Our location today is Samode Bagh, which is the gardens for Beecham House.

It's an incredibly beautiful, very big garden, with some lovely features in it.

There's something about this location that feels very much of the time that we're shooting.

- [Chadha] Oh my God.

We're shooting in one of the biggest tourist places in the whole of Jaipur.

- [Bateman] The locations that we've been filming in are huge tourist attractions like The Amber Fort.

The Taj Mahal.

There was the city palace in the middle of the square.

And we're filming in the middle of the day and you can't lock them down.

So you're literally doing a scene and you can see behind the camera, I'm not exaggerating, four, five hundred people, waiting to be let through.

- [Chadha] With a historical show it's important to get the political context right but also, the sort of cultural practices, and the architectural details.

So we have worked hard at doing that.

- [Ralph] And we've caught that.

I think we've definitely caught it.

It doesn't look like anything else on television.

It looks rich and warm and inviting and relaxing.

It looks like a piece of Indian cinema and I think that's, that's incredible.

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