Upstairs, Downstairs served to correct the imbalance of the class system on 1970s televsision
BEFORE there was Downton there was Upstairs, Downstairs, London Weekend Television’s hugely successful historical drama which ran for 68 episodes from 1971 to 1975.
The entire series is now being repeated on Talking Pictures TV (Sky 328, Freeview 81, Freesat 306 and Virgin 445), taking us from 1903 to 1930 in the lives of the Bellamy family and their servants.
Actresses Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins devised the series after seeing the success of another period drama, The Forsyte Saga and noticing that it paid no attention to the lives of the servants.
Marsh cheerfully admitted that the idea was partly so that both of them could get decent roles, but she also wanted to correct what she saw as an imbalance in TV’s portrayal of the class
system. Both she and Atkins were the daughters of domestic servants.
Little went right at first. The series went through several name changes, and there were production problems (the earlier episodes were in black and white) and London Weekend Television’s executives were so unenthusiastic about it to begin with that it was initially broadcast in a “dead” slot late on Sunday evenings.
The series revolved around the “Upstairs” family of MP Richard Bellamy (David Langton) at their home at Eaton Place in London. They are wealthy, but not hugely so. The soap-opera early on concerns the extramarital antics of the first Lady Bellamy, as well as the wayward ways of their children.
Nowadays, though, the Upstairs characters are not nearly as well remembered as the servants – John Alderton as valet and chauffeur Watkins, Angela Baddeley as the gruff cook Mrs Bridges, and Jean Marsh, who got her desired role as level-headed housemaid Rose. The part of the maid Sarah, carved out for Eileen Atkins, went to Pauline Collins as
Atkins was working elsewhere.
Most of all, though, we remember Gordon Jackson as the impeccable and utterly unflappable butler Hudson.
Despite its initially disastrous time slot, it quickly took off (and was moved to an earlier time) and, just as Downton would decades later, it proved very popular in America.
It even produced a successful culinary spin-off in the Mrs Bridges brand of upmarket provisions which is still in business (see www.mrsbridges. co.uk).
By the standards of early 1970s TV, there was nothing highbrow about Upstairs, Downstairs, with plotlines including suicide, babystealing, blackmail and more including, inevitably, an upperclass male getting one of the maids pregnant.
Likewise, it nods towards all the wider historical events of the time, often in a manner we’d consider ham-fisted, such as when a prominent cast member is about to travel to America on this marvellous new White Star liner called the Titanic …
Looked at another way, though, this was a gritty and relatively unromantic portrayal of life below stairs, a life which many of the older women who were among its biggest fans in the 1970s remembered only too well.
A brief BBC revival, with a number of episodes continuing the story from 1936, was screened in 2010-12.
Upstairs, Downstairs is on Talking Pictures TV every Sunday at 6pm, repeated Fridays at 5pm. If you want to catch the whole series you’ve just missed the Sunday broadcast of episode one, but you should be able to get it this Friday, December 4.