“I’m reminded of the late author and only daughter of a British Army Officer Dame Barbara Cartland,
who was asked by a journalist, ‘Has the class system really broken down?’ She said to the journalist,
‘Well, of course it has”, the famous Dame retorted, “or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you.”
--Writer of the USDS 2010 series, Heidi Thomas
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/arts/television/upstairs-downstairs-sequel-on-pbs-masterpiece.html?pagewanted=allTelevision
Rose, Fetch Her Ladyship a Sequel
By SARAH LYALL
Published: April 1, 2011 From left, Ellie Kendrick, Keeley Hawes, Adrian Scarborough, Jean Marsh and Nico Mirallegro
in the new “Upstairs Downstairs” on “Masterpiece.” Some members of the former "Upstairs, Downstairs" cast, from left: Jean Marsh (the original and still
present Rose), Simon Williams, Angela Baddeley, David Langton and Gordon Jackson.LONDONTHIRTY-FOUR years ago the door closed firmly and finally on
165 Eaton Place, the longtime home in London of the upper-crust
Bellamy family and its retinue of servants. Before the end the parlor maid,
Rose Buck (
Jean Marsh), took one final walk through the empty rooms, the ghosts of the past swirling and murmuring around her. She glanced back as she left and saw the sign on the front of the house: “For Sale.”
“Upstairs, Downstairs” was the longest-running and, according to a survey of viewers a few years back, best-loved series ever broadcast on “Masterpiece” (formerly and more familiarly known as
“Masterpiece Theater”) on public television. It ran for 55 episodes over four seasons in the United States, won seven Emmy Awards and was shown in 70 countries. When it was over in 1977,
Alistair Cooke, the program’s host, said there should be a national day of mourning. Viewers who elaborately planned their Sundays around the show in that prehistoric pre-VCR, pre-TiVo era felt bereft and mildly traumatized when it all ended, as if members of their own family had moved away forever.
Now there is a new, three-part “Upstairs Downstairs” set in 1936, six fictional years after the old one ended (the first is scheduled to be broadcast on PBS next Sunday). It features the old house but a new family,
Lady Agnes and
Sir Hallam Holland, a handsome young diplomatic couple just returned from Washington. As they enter the dusty, neglected front hall for the first time, Lady Agnes delivers her verdict: “What a ghastly mausoleum.”
It is a witty acknowledgment of what the makers of the new “Upstairs Downstairs” hope to do: satisfy the passionate viewers from long ago while acknowledging that much of the modern audience, too young to have seen the original, may regard even beloved 1970s costume dramas as relics from another age.
The original “Upstairs” was stately, frothy fun against a backdrop of exciting historical events. Its great success reflected America’s perennial fascination with period drama about the British upper classes and the rigidly delineated system over which they presided, a fascination all the more enthusiastic perhaps for emanating from a country where class is no longer supposed to matter.
“It was a soap opera — a literate, classy, well-decorated, well-written soap opera about the private lives and social history of a group of charming British people,” said
Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of “Masterpiece.”
Almost since that last episode ended, people have talked about whether, and how, to make some sort of sequel. For a time there had been word of a musical, then of a movie and even of a Hollywood sitcom in which Miss Marsh and
Gordon Jackson, who died in 1990 and played the incomparable butler,
Hudson, would portray the proprietors of a butler-and-maid service. (“Neither Gordon nor I were up for that,” Miss Marsh said.)
But maybe only now, with viewers’ memories slightly hazy after so long (and with most of the original cast dead) has it been truly possible. And after “Upstairs Downstairs” drew huge audiences in Britain last Christmas — nearly 9 million people on average watched each episode, a huge number in a country of 61 million — the expectations for “Masterpiece” are even greater. “This is the most anticipated sequel of anything we’ve ever done, with the possible exception of
Helen Mirren in
‘Prime Suspect,’ ” Ms. Eaton said.
The creators have tried to satisfy fans of the original and newcomers by acknowledging that while the same elements had to be there — the loves, worries and intrigues of two sets of people in one grand household in the center of London — the way the program looks and feels had to reflect modern sensibilities. “People remember ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ as exquisite drama, and you have to give them exquisite drama,” said
Heidi Thomas, the British screenwriter (
“Cranford”) who wrote the new episodes. “But if we replicated the pace and tone of the original, people might find it slow according to present-day standards, perhaps a little theatrical and plodding.”
Besides the house and the theme music, the strongest connective thread between the old and new programs is Miss Marsh herself, who returns to play Rose once more. Now 76, Miss Marsh was a much younger actress when she conceived of “Upstairs, Downstairs” with her great friend
Eileen Atkins.
This time she returns as the Hollands’ housekeeper. Ms. Atkins, who was not in the original, does appear in this one, playing Sir Hallam’s doughty mother,
Maud, Lady Holland. She has lately returned from India trailing a strong sense of entitlement and an entourage consisting of an exotic turbanned manservant (
Art Malik, of
“The Jewel in the Crown”) and a spoiled pet monkey.
Though just a few years have passed between the old version and the new, a great many changes have taken place, both in the fictional world the characters inhabit and the real one in which the audience lives. (Also, the title seems to have lost its original comma.)
While the Bellamys had to contend with the
Titanic — one character,
Lady Marjorie, sadly went down on it — World War I, the emergence of the suffragist movement and the crash of 1929, the Hollands are moving to a Britain poised for drastic, irrevocable change.
War is looming. The working classes are questioning the great certainty by which they have always lived: that there is a place for everyone, and everyone in his place. The political classes are beginning to divide between those who want to avoid war at all costs and those who believe that even war is justified if it means stopping Hitler. And the glittering social life of the era carries on just the same, in a last glorious gasp.
“I wanted to have a young family, a young marriage going ahead with all the concerns we have in the present day but particular to the 1930s,” Miss Thomas said. “They’re representatives of a kind of family about to become extinct. We’re not talking about just changes but about the end of the upper class as they had always been understood, or understood themselves, to be.”
There is turmoil from the beginning. In the first episode
George V inconveniently dies, thrusting the throne into the incapable hands of his eldest son, the shallow, lightweight
Edward VIII, too in thrall to the American divorcée
Wallis Simpson to want to keep it for long. (The chic and outspoken Mrs. Simpson makes a scene-stealing cameo at a party, along with a man she has asked to bring as her “special guest” and who, unfortunately, is not the right special guest.)
Claire Foy as Lady Persie. Jean Marsh as Rose.Added into the mix are Lady Agnes’s pretty, spoiled sister,
Lady Persie (
Claire Foy), who feels perhaps a bit too familiar with the family’s chauffeur,
Spargo (
Neil Jackson), a blond bit of rough with sympathies for what
Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement promises to do for the working class.
Lady Agnes (
Keeley Hawes) has her hands full running the house and handling her mother-in-law; she longs for a baby with her husband (
Ed Stoppard, son of
Tom). Lady Holland is writing her memoirs; the servants have their own complicated hopes, loves and intrigues, and there is a new butler,
Mr. Pritchard (
Adrian Scarborough), late of the Cunard liner company.
Old-time viewers will find that everything looks more opulent and glamorous this time around. Most of the filming was done at various BBC studios in Wales, where elaborate sets of parts of the Eaton Place house were constructed.
On a cold rainy day in Cardiff Bay last fall several of the actors were filming a scene in which Lady Persie flounces into Spargo’s car, a vintage Humber, and plops down next to him. He sends her to the back seat, reminding her that she has to abide by “the rules,” just as he does.
“Their relationship is where the two sides — upstairs and downstairs — meet,” Mr. Jackson said between takes, dressed immaculately in his chauffeur’s uniform, complete with sleeve garters to keep his cuffs in place. “She shuns the archetype of who she’s supposed to be, and he shuns having to bow down to authority.”
The old sets looked cheesier, Miss Marsh recalled, and had to be taken down and put into storage after each episode, only to come out again. Back then, she said, actors rehearsed each episode for eight or nine days and shot it in three and a half hours; now they rehearse on the fly, and each episode takes three weeks to film.
“The standards of television production have gotten so much higher,” said
Adam Suschitzky, the director of photography. “Everything has to be much closer to the standards of a feature film now.”
Nico Mirallegro as a footman in the new "Upstairs Downstairs." The show reflects a fascination with
the British upper classes.“Upstairs Downstairs,” produced with the BBC, follows another costume drama on “Masterpiece,” the endlessly entertaining
“Downton Abbey,” produced by Carnival and Masterpiece in Britain. The British newspapers made much of the supposed competition between the two programs, but that is beside the point for “Masterpiece.”
“It’s one of the most recognizable titles we’ve ever done, and the most recognizable British drama title in this country,” Ms. Eaton said. “Masterpiece,” supplemented by PBS, is putting extra advertising and marketing money into the broadcast and banking on it being a hit.
Thanks to fervent audience reaction in Britain, Miss Thomas is already working on six new episodes for a second “Upstairs” season, possibly set in 1938.
“One of the things that was very nerve-racking was the thought that we’d have two audiences: a new audience that wasn’t even born when the first one went out and the die-hard fans who would be scrutinizing it and looking for evidence of fidelity,” Miss Thomas said. “If we were competing with anything, we were competing with the specter of the original.”