All the Raj

ANDY Dalziel is back from five weeks in Australia and looking like he's about to explode. He's has a very red face, so red someone remarks that he's "fried his face".

The truth is that Warren Clarke's scowling detective isn't one to heed warnings about the dangers of sunbathing and has returned looking like a boiled lobster (but not as tasty).

Right now he's lost his temper, along with his luggage containing his house and car keys. His colleagues, notably sidekick Pascoe, don't welcome him back with open arms. You get the impression things have been happier without him. "Grumpiness isn't a requisite part of being the boss," Pascoe tells a fellow copper surprised by his civility. At least Dalziel has something to take his mind off his holiday horrors. Not, it must be reported, a very interesting case, which is sparked off by a suspicious death in a university science department.

Animal rights campaigners and a clinical trial involving molecular nano-science (whatever that is) and the secret of eternal youth are involved. Dalziel is sceptical about the experiments. "Found a way to turn crap into gold?," he asks contemptuously. TV programme makers have been trying to find the formula for that for years.

He's one man who wouldn't have been at home in India. I can't see his bull in a china shop attitude fitting in in British India, where even the remotest part of the country had a touch of the Home Counties. And if there's one thing that Dalziel isn't, it's Home Counties.

Lost World Of The Raj takes us back in time to consider life during the last phase of the Raj through newly-discovered home movie footage of a "privileged and exotic world". Some of the people who lived there are taken back to their old haunts to relive those days.

For many, it must have seemed like one long holiday in this "oasis of ordered calm". If there's one thing we Brits know how to do, it's treat other people's countries as if we own them and ensure the locals are gainfully employed, waiting on us hand and foot for little money.

The old cine film is a fascinating reminder of the way we were, as are the talking heads recalling their time in India. One woman recalls how her family - all three of them - had 18 servants. The grass wasn't cut with a mower but plucked by Indian women.

Margaret Williams, who came from England to marry her fiance working in the Indian civil service, remembers the vials of anti-snake venom on the mantlepiece and the shock of the bathroom with its mud floor, thunderbox and tin bathtub.

New mothers had no childcare worries, receiving more help than they'd have got in England. Indian nursemaids fed, bathed and played with the babies and were on call 24 hours a day. Sometimes children were fluent in Hindi before they spoke English.

Some Brits stayed on, like former BBC correspondent Mark Tully, who reported from India. He and his sister, Prue Swindells, show their childhood home movies that they've just found. There's obviously been a lot of attic clearing going on for this series.

It's hard to find anyone brought up in the Raj who doesn't look back on their childhood as an idyllic time. The servants tell a different story. The women didn't only serve around the home but also in the bedroom. The results - mixed race children - were "spirited away".

One says that his Indian mother worked on the tea plantations and his father was the manager. He was one of thousands of children, the products of illicit mixed race unions, born in India between 1919 and 1947. A legacy of the Empire you won't find in the history books.