A comedy about intellectual corruption, the play features an emperor, a charlady, a peasant, princess Turandot and an enormous number of "Tuis".
There were family legends about a great-uncle who "won a fight with a bear" and an aunt who crossed the Alps with brigands, as well as violent tales from the distant past featuring an emperor who blinded hundreds of prisoners, a peasant king crowned with a circlet of white-hot iron and countless "bloodthirsty" Turks.
Like The Count of Monte Cristo, Jones's book features an exiled emperor, a conspiracy involving imperial restoration, an impregnable prison, an unjust imprisonment, a fellow prisoner with wisdom and wealth to bequeath, a daring escape dependent on the removal of a corpse, unimaginable treasure, fabulous fetes and balls, appalling betrayals and the intricacies of vengeance.
But there's only one replacement show that anyone here is talking about: an NBC family drama bloodier than "The Tudors" and more inexplicable than "Lost," a tragedy about comedy featuring an imperious emperor and his two dueling jesters in a once-mighty and now-blighted kingdom.
The computer-animated movie Surf's Up (2007) features a surfing emperor penguin named Zeke "Big-Z" Topanga.
But the pièce de résistance was the gigantic master bedroom suite featuring a Roman emperor-size bed, with an adjacent lounging area with armchairs, a chaise longue and fireplace.
The film also features a massacre - orchestrated by an emperor determined to cling on to power - and a cover-up, which prompted more than one critic to draw comparisons with the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.
Subsequent documentaries include two with director John-Paul Davidson: "Boys from Brazil" (1993), about Brazilian transvestite prostitutes; and "The Sweatbox" (2002), a documentary on the making of the Disney animated feature "The Emperor's New Groove" which Trudie also stepped behind the camera to co-direct.
The latest Disney animated feature, The Emperor's New Groove, arrives here after widely publicised production problems and box-office disaster over Christmas.
But then, an emperor is an emperor.
