From the archives: Right now, Bridgerton is the most famous period drama on the planet and before it, Downton Abbey ruled supreme but they might owe a small slice of their success to another series dreamt up by two UK actress friends, Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins. Originally scheduled for ITV’s Sunday night’s graveyard spot, Upstairs, Downstairs became one of the most watched and awarded TV shows of the early 1970s.
Fifty years ago this month, when it arrived in New Zealand, Sheila Bowen wrote about “the most successful television series ever produced” for the Listener. In her article from our 1974 archives, Bowen explains why the series recaptured some English upper-and lower-class lives during the Edwardian era as the world moved toward modernity.
AMONG those trying to entertain a world suffering from future shock, the word now is “Go back young man.” So, hard on the stately heels of the Victorian Forsyte Saga comes the Edwardian Upstairs, Downstairs, all about servants and their betters in an elegant London house in the early 1900s. There is nothing documentary about it, though. The series mixes the real problems and emotions of the gentry (a la The Forsyte Saga) with the equally real problems and emotions of the hoi polloi (a la Coronation Street) and does as well as you would expect. The audience is staggering. When it began screening in Britain in 1971, Upstairs, Downstairs shot straight to the top of the national ratings, winning 15 million viewers by its second week.
By the time the initial 13 stories had been screened, the series had attracted as fanatical a following as The Forsyte Saga, the rival BBC’s marathon adaptation of John Galsworthy’s novels. Upstairs, Downstairs is claimed to be the first major costume series specially written for British television. It also presents a fascinating pre-World War I Britain, where two million people worked as butlers, footmen, chauffeurs, cooks, housemaids, parlourmaids, kitchenmaids and nannies, often for as little as $40 a year. At the other extreme were the people of the great houses where house-guests (who brought their own servants) ate gargantuan meals and where the “goings-on” were such that hostesses planned their bedrooms carefully so that women arriving alone were not too far removed from the men known to be their lovers. (If traffic between rooms was too heavy “the servants might talk”. The evidence was that they did anyway.)
Of course, there is nothing new about depicting households with servants. Countless costume dramas have seen immaculate butlers appearing from nowhere at the flick of the master’s finger, the maid bobbing in and out of the drawing room with afternoon tea, the chauffeur bringing the Rolls to the front steps. But Upstairs, Downstairs is unique in that it shows the servants “below stairs” as real people with real lives to lead. In fact, the storylines present the Bellamy family’s domestic staff as major characters, of equal dramatic importance to the privileged, ruling-class occupants of the “above stairs” zones of the household.
Producer John Hawkesworth and story editor Alfred Shaughnessy, both former stalwarts of the British film industry, take great pains to ensure authenticity, and both have also written key scripts for the series.
Shaughnessy has his own upper-class background to call on for inspiration. His stepfather, Sir Piers Legh, was Equerry to the-then Prince of Wales (subsequently Edward VIII and then Duke of Windsor after abdicating). He remembers the momentous day when Edward VII came to lunch, bringing his mistress, Mrs Keppel. The tension among the servants was incredible, he recalls, falling over themselves practising bows and curtsies.
Hawkesworth also comes from a privileged English upper-class background.
He was educated at the exclusive Rugby School, the Sorbonne and Oxford, and served with Shaughnessy as an officer in the Grenadier Guards during World War Il. “The Edwardian period was a fascinating era,” says Hawkesworth. “There was glitter and glamour, but also the most appalling squalor and poverty. A servant thought himself very fortunate indeed to have a job in a household. At least as a servant there was food and shelter and a little money for spending.”
It was a sort of golden age before the magic was shattered by World War I. It was also an age when things were stirring, when ideas for social reform were being discussed widely, and the accepted conventions of the prior Victorian era were being challenged from all sides.
Upstairs, Downstairs boasts a formidable cast of “regulars”. Upstairs is master of the house Richard Bellamy (David Langton), his wife Lady Marjorie (Rachel Gurney) and their children Elizabeth (Nicola Pagett) and James (Simon Williams). Downstairs, the servants rally under their uncrowned king, Mr Hudson the butler (Gordon Jackson). Prominent among the rest of the domestic staff are head housemaid Rose (Jean Marsh), cook (Angela Baddeley) under-housemaid Sarah (Pauline Collins), chauffeur Watkins (John Alderton), lady’s maid Roberts (Patsy Smart) and footman Edward (Christopher Beeny). Upstairs, Downstairs was originally an idea by Jean Marsh, who takes the key role of Rose, and a fellow actress, Eileen Atkins.
Both are Cockney girls who had close relatives once in domestic service. It was originally intended that Eileen would appear too, playing another maid. But Eileen’s outstanding success on the London stage, with Sarah Miles in the play Vivat Vivat Regina, meant that she didn’t have the time. John Clements and Sheila Jackson take infinite care to preserve Edwardian authenticity in their sets and costumes respectively. Their “Bible” for props, furnishings and clothes is a rare and closely-guarded catalogue, dated 1907, from London’s famous Army and Navy Stores.
The Bellamys live in Belgravia, and a house in exclusive Eaton Place is used for exterior filming with a fictitious number added to make the address 165 Eaton Place instead of 65. Coincidentally, the suave actor Langton (who plays Richard Bellamy so effectively that little old ladies stop him in the street and inquire quite seriously after the health of “Lady Marjorie and your lovely children”) himself lives in Eaton Place.
Statistically, Upstairs, Downstairs is one of the most successful television series ever produced. Excluding the British audience of 15 million, the series is also seen by a further 50 million viewers in Australia, Canada, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Portugal, Sweden and Yugoslavia. And now, New Zealand.
This article originally appeared in the June 1, 1974, issue of the New Zealand Listener.
