Tennant added, “We’ve worked really hard on excitement and spills.”
Faroon said the show’s narrative arc was shaped by the route the travelers took, traveling east from Europe to Yemen, India, Hong Kong and the Pacific and to the west and east coasts of the United States before returning to London. (Aside from the short scenes shot in London, the shooting was done in South Africa, which represented the “hot countries,” Pharaoh explained, and Romania, which was used for scenes in Europe and North America.)
“The research was mostly about finding something that was really going on that year in those countries,” said Pharaoh, referring to 1872. Real historical events were used to build plot lines, he explained, which include the uprisings in Paris, “political hoaxes” in India and another in which Bas Reeves takes a white prisoner to trial.
“Each episode is in a different country and has a separate story, so it’s almost like small movies,” Pharaoh said. “It was very ambitious for television because from a design perspective, you had to create every episode from scratch.”
When it was suggested that telling a story set in colonial Britain might be a sensitive issue today, Tennant said that from a twenty-first century perspective, “you have to admit it’s not something to celebrate.”
He added, “I think that’s part of Vogue’s journey – realizing that the world he’s in isn’t necessarily the world as it should be. And you have a Passepartout looking at everything with a raised eyebrow, another lens on colonial history. I think people will go, this is a time in history we have mixed feelings. towards him.”
Then he grinned, settled into his chair and looked around the beautiful garden. “But everyone loves period drama!”