I believe I’m honest, monsieur, but, to be outspoken, I’ve had several trades. J ean Passepartout, a surname which has clung to me because I have a natural aptness for going out of one business into another. The new valet introduces himself to Fogg thusly: The man who comes to replace Forster has lived a precarious life and seeks tranquility.

Fogg would, according to his daily habit, quit Saville Row, and repair to the Reform. Phileas Fogg was seated squarely in his armchair, his feet close together like those of a grenadier on parade, his hands resting on his knees, his body straight, his head erect he was steadily watching a complicated clock which indicated the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the days, the months, and the years. On this very 2nd of October he had dismissed James Forster, because that luckless youth had brought him shaving-water at eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit instead of eighty-six and he was awaiting his successor, who was due at the house between eleven and half-past. The habits of its occupant were such as to demand but little from the sole domestic, but Phileas Fogg required him to be almost superhumanly prompt and regular. The mansion in Saville Row, though not sumptuous, was exceedingly comfortable. He is a man bound by his time and by time as measured by clocks.

In particular, he was noting a man who seems to abstain from emotional contact and the irregularities of a well-lived life, strenuously avoiding serendipity by moving his world in accordance with clocks. When Jules Verne wrote “Around the World in 80 Days,” he was a French man looking at the English. Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan) falls in love with a French impressionist painting student, Monique Laroche (Belgian Cécile de France). That fiasco amplified the East Asian aspect of the original because Chan’s Passepartout was in reality Lau Xing, a man who just robbed the Bank of England and fights a Chinese general (Karen Joy Mom as General Fang). Jules Verne’s classic had also been made into a 2004 vehicle where two older action stars (Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger) were featured.

This is particularly noticeable because the original thesis is that the trip is made possible by a new railroad in India where the British have already been exercising their colonial power and in India, the protagonist meets a woman who will travel with him and his valet, Jean Passepartout. BBC’s latest “Around the World in 80 Days” is an exercise in re-writing and unlike the French original, is characterized by the absence of Asians.

Around the world in 80 days written by