The Jewel In The Crown Is Brought Back To Its Former Glory

Thirty years after it was first broadcast on British television, BBC Studios and Post Production's award-winning Digital Media Services team has digitally restored and remastered over 30 hours of film to bring The Jewel in the Crown back to its former glory for ITV Studios Global Entertainment. Produced by Granada Television, and based on the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott, the stunning 13-part award-winning drama series stars Art Malik, Charles Dance and Peggy Ashcroft, and charts the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II.
With the original series shot on 16mm film, much of it on location in rural India, the challenging brief for the BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services team was to seamlessly integrate the 1980s source footage with an extremely wide variety of variable quality archive and historical footage so that the 13 restored episodes had a consistent look and feel throughout.
As Kevin Shaw, Lead Technologist at BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services, explained: "No two remastering projects are ever the same and they all pose their own particular challenges. But ultimately our job is to extract the finest possible images from whatever material we’re working with. This is always tricky when combining many different sources of footage of vastly differing quality. It's a painstaking process to manually check and restore each image frame-by-frame but it means that we can ensure that every single detail is optimised for the viewer."
Rod Carter, Head of Operations at ITV Studios Global Entertainment, said: "ITV Studios Global Entertainment is committed to preserving these historical documents to ensure the highest possible quality is available for future generations to enjoy. With The Jewel in the Crown celebrating its 30th anniversary, what better way to enjoy this enduring classic?"
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