A dramatic passport to an exotic world

England's Granada TV addes another jewel to its crown with the lush period piece Lost Empires (CBC, Thursday at 8pm). Adapted from a novel by J.B. Priestley, the seven part miniseries stars Colin Firth as the callow, 20 year old Richard Herncastle, who joins his uncle's music hall troupe in Edwardian England and meets :people with more faces than the town hall."

The young clerk, who comes from a small town "smelling of damp wood and high moral tone." uses his uncle, stage illusionist Ganga Dun, as his passport to a world of loose morals and wild characters. Unlike the naive Richard, Colin Firth is a sophisticated actor who has starred on television, stage and in film.

"I'm not like Richard Herncastle at all," Firth says from his home in London. "I'm not from the north of England, I don't have family like that, and I haven't plunged into war." Instead the actor was born to a middle class family in Hampshire, and has lived all overf England and Nigeria with his teacher father and mother.

While still a drama student at London's Drama Centre, he was offered the break many actors waite for in vain- the chance to star ona West End stage. He was featured in Julian Mitchell's acclaimed Another Country,which told the school experiences of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean who, years later were exposed as Soviet spies. Even more surprising, while in the middle of his stage run, Firth switched roles to star in the 1984 film version of Another Country.

"It was the weirdest thing to switch back and forth between the two roles" Firth says of his experience. Lost Empires was taxing in a different way, th actor says. "It was a hell of a marathon because we took a year for filming."In the opening two hour episode, Richard Herncastle meets the has been vaudevillian Harry Burrard, of who it is said "You could see despair in his eyes."

Laurence Olivier gives a hear rendering portrayal of the snivelling, paranoid Burrard, who lobs off tired jokes and hackneyed routies for booing audiences.

"Naturally people always ask what it's like to work with Olivier and you're expected to say he's a wonderful old, a great old man of theatre" Firth says. "But he really is marvellous. I was a little overawed at the thought of meeting the guy but I met him one to one and he was doing his job the same as me. he called me 'partner' and put me at ease. And whenever someone yelled 'action' he shed 20 years and had 10 times the energy of the others . He's quite electric. Very charming and absolutely magnetic when he gets going."

The huge cast includes Brian Glover, Richard Gurney, Pamela Stephenson, Lila Kaye, Beatie Edney, Alfred Marks and scene stealing Carmen DuSautoy, who plays Herncastles's illicit lover. Since Lost Empires finished shooting last May, Firth has completed a radio play and another film based on the novel A Month in the Country. In it, he plays a mentally scarred soldier returning from the first [sic] World War and trying to piece together his life in a remote town in Yorkshire.

Firth isn't sure what projects are next, although he may star in a new BBC production. But, as he says "like Herncastle things tend to happen to me. They just jump out at me.: