Costly Gaijin gets the chop

PRODUCTION on the lavish television miniseries Gaijin has stopped, just one week after it started.

NBC television network, which was making the eight-hour miniseries based on the best-selling novel by James Clavell, said the project was too expensive.

Richard Chamberlain, who starred in the television version of Clavell's earlier Japanese epic, Shogun - one of the most successful miniseries ever - was set to narrate the 19th-century drama.

The series, set in Japan 20 years after the close of Taipan, was to have starred Diana Rigg, Edward Woodward, Ben Cross, Tim Curry and Roddy McDowell.

When it was announced, with a budget of US$30 million (HK$231 million), NBC described it as 'the world television event of the decade'.