Upstairs Downstairs

1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 5 (UK)

This LWT series about life in an English aristocratic household in the early 20th century was steeped in real upstairs and downstairs experience. The idea for the series came to Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh, two actress friends, whose parents had been in domestic service. The drama, which was to run for 68 episodes, was script-edited by Alfred Shaughnessy, whose stepfather was the son of a lord, and who grew up with the Prince of Wales and other royalty dropping in for dinner.

Producer John Hawkesworth had enjoyed a similarly glamorous upper-class childhood in Belgravia and knew how people stepped through the minefield of Edwardian manners. Together they were free to recreate some of the sexual and social scandals Victorian writers had discreetly glossed over. Between them all they developed an elegant entertainment - "history without tears" - about the family and staff of Lord Bellamy, set in a world about to be changed forever by the First World War.

Jean Marsh's mother was a Hackney housemaid, and Jean, who had played many smooth rich ladies, longed to explore the trapped regimented lives of servants so little of which had been seen on television.

She created for herself head parlour-maid Rose, no longer young, who'd missed her chances of marriage and who earned a miserable £30 a year yet ironically took more pride in the aristocracy than either pampered Lady Marjorie or young Miss Elizabeth, the women she waited on upstairs.

The role for Eileen Atkins, daughter of an under-butler, was to have been Sarah, the under-parlour-maid who arrived at the Bellamy's grand Eaton Square home and caused upsets on all floors. Unfortunately Eileen made too much of a success playing a woman further up the social scale, Elizabeth I, on stage in Vivat Regina and wasn't free for television, so the role went to Pauline Collins.

But it was perhaps the older servants who appealed the most when the series began in October 1971. Scottish actor Gordon Jackson made an immediate impact as the butler Hudson, playing him, as the Daily Mirror commented 'with an air of a man who'd been a preacher in some joyless kirk'. Gordon had never met a butler in his life and said Hudson stood for everything he disliked, but his starchy stiffness was partly due to an accident which almost robbed him of the role. After a car crash on the day before the first day of recording, he had broken bones in one hand and received five stitches over an eye. It meant he had to turn his left profile to the camera and do everything left-handed.

Angela Baddeley's fat huffing-and-puffing cook Mrs Bridges was another favourite, especially with American audiences who garlanded her with awards. The 66-year-old actress weighed only 7½ stone so was padded out for the part. She died only months after the series ended in February 1976.

Much employed too, were Christopher Beeny's inept young footman Edward and Jenny Tomasin's hopeless kitchen-maid Ruby. Her pathetic defeated face deserved an award of its own.

Upstairs characters - David Langton's suave Lord B and Rachel Gurney's fragrant Lady Marjorie - stayed this side of caricature. When a second series was rushed to the screen in January 1972, and Lady M had an affair with a dashing captain (played by David Kernan) but returned dutifully to her family, viewers must have sympathised entirely. Gurney wanted to leave the following year, so the writers had her sink with the Titanic when the fourth series began in October 1973. Mourning followed. One family in a Worcestershire village draped their front door knocker with black crepe . . .

After a decent interval, Lord Bellamy was allowed to re-marry. Viewers' pet Hannah Gordon came in as the lucky girl, Scottish widow Virginia Hamilton.

The younger nobs - Simon Williams's dissolute Captain James (who ended his own life), Nicola Pagett's pouting Miss Elizabeth and Lesley-Anne Down's flapper-turned-war heroine Georgina - came to the fore later in the series. By then the plots had become more melodramatic, and critics couldn't fail to notice that despite a time-lapse of nearly thirty years, no one looked a day older.

But life at 165 Eaton Square was still highly watchable with a charming cameo performance from Robert Hardy as a homosexual house-guest and the arrival of Anthony Andrews as the Marquis of Stockbridge whose lavish wedding to Georgina ended the phenomenally successful show.

Exported to America and thirty other countries, Upstairs Downstairs was British television's biggest earner so far. The Americans, whose National Academy of Television Arts twice voted it Best Series, produced their own copy called Beacon Hill about a rich Boston family, then another, The Adams Chronicles, following four generations over 150 years. Oddly they had to wait until 1988 to see all of Upstairs Downstairs. The censors initially rejected thirteen episodes, some in black and white, because they dealt with suicide, homosexuality and adultery - subjects thought too daring for US family audiences in the 1970s