Upstairs Downstairs started screening in the UK in 1971 and was an instant success. Unlike the solidly working-class soap opera Coronation Street, this soapie featured both extremes of the British caste system, upper and lower, with all gradations in-between.
Upstairs Downstairs also shared some of the production values which have enriched so many great British drama series. It was tolerably well written, well filmed, acted and directed, and viewers were easily beguiled into thinking they were viewing something of worth, rather than the escapist rubbish it really was. Enjoyable, yes. But rubbish all the same.
The series traced the affairs (business, life and love affairs) of those who lived 'upstairs' in a grand Edwardian house in London just before the Great War, and the servants who lived beneath.
The house is owned by a member of the British upper-middle caste, a prosperous Tory MP, Richard Bellamy. He has married a member of the upper-caste; an Earl's daughter, Lady Marjorie Bellamy. She's jolly decent about having married beneath her... she doesn't even seem to mind that he's an absolute crashing bore.
Her daughter Elizabeth is a suffragette, a member of the mildly-socialist Fabian society which is pledged to destroy the caste system. She in turn marries another Fabian. Even worse, he's a poet. But it's OK really, because he turns out to be a member of the same caste - solid upper-middle, just playing at being a poet, really.
Downstairs, things are a bit more fluid. Hudson the butler is every bit as much a crashing bore as Bellamy upstairs, and even more rigid in his adherence to the caste system. But to stir things up, there's Sarah the maid, who has a fling with the Bellamy boy Lawrence, and even for a time goes onto the music-hall stage. It's girls like that who threaten the whole structure!
The English in fact call their social apartheid structure the 'class' system, but it's uncannily like the repellent caste system of India, and Upstairs Downstairs describes it perfectly. It's quite disturbing to watch - especially when you realise that the English don't find this at all odd. They take great comfort in knowing their place in this rigid society.
This double-DVD set brings us eight of the first 13 episodes of Upstairs Downstairs; it is in fact the first season minus five early black and white episodes. I found myself enjoying some of the episodes in a guilty sort of way, mainly because of the effervescent acting of Pauline Collins as the wild downstairs girl Sarah.
Pauline Collins left the show after the second series (heading off for something far more worthwhile, the deliriously wonderful Wodehouse Playhouse, but Upstairs Downstairs went on running for a further three series', for a total of 68 episodes. I imagine lots of people will get nostalgic pleasure from this series - but I find time re-affirms just how flimsy it really was.
The same production company, Granada, also produced around the same time one of the true highlights of British television, the series Love in a Cold Climate - it's strange that the mediocre Upstairs Downstairs has found release on DVD ahead of that masterpiece.
For a series shot on video more than 30 years ago, the quality is surprisingly good.
It does look dated, especially in the slightly wobbly and blurry title cards at the opening of the episodes, but the generally pastel-toned colour has been preserved extremely well. Definition is clear, with no aliasing, and with no deterioration evident at all.
