Robin as an enlightened postcolonial leader (BBC/Tiger Aspect’s Robin Hood, episode 2:1)
Andrew B. R. Elliott
When considering the impact of British historical or period dramas on the wider televisual landscape, the Middle Ages is perhaps not the period that springs most readily to mind. Recent global hits such as Downton Abbey (2010– ), Call the Midwife (2012– ), or Lark Rise to Candleford (2008–2011) continue to support James Redmond’s claim that “while there have been some outstanding successes with the Tudor and the late Stuart periods, the period most frequently portrayed or recalled is the recent past—the last part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries.”[1] Although several critics recognize that other periods have also been plundered for source material, even in these cases the Middle Ages are often notable by their absence; to cite only one example, Lez Cooke’s list of historical dramas and the periods they depict leaps from ancient Rome in I, Claudius (1976) directly to the eighteenth century of Poldark (1975–1977).[2]
The logical question that this oversight raises, however, leads to a rather revealing response, most notably in Colin McArthur’s suggestion that
it seems reasonable to suppose that a society going through a period of transition and finding it immensely painful and disorientating will therefore tend to recreate, in some at least of its art, images of more (apparently) settled times, especially times in which the self-image of the society as a whole was buoyant and optimistic. For post-war Britain, faced as it is with adjustment to being a post-colonial power, a mediocre economic performer, a multi-racial society and a society in which the consensus of acceptable social and political behavior is fragmenting (all, of course, factors which are intimately inter-related), what better ideological choice, in its art, than to return to the period of the zenith of bourgeois and imperial power or to immediately succeeding periods in which the facade of that power appeared convincing.[3]
In this case, then, perhaps the question might be not why the Middle Ages and early modern periods are not included but rather why we would want to in the first place, if they do not offer the same kind of “usable past” that could be harnessed in the service of a nostalgic return to a golden age of British power. The answer is, as I hope to show, that dramas set in the medieval and early modern period can also bring something to the debate, frequently harnessing precisely those same values and ideas that characterize the more familiar kinds of period dramas.
In order to reduce a highly complex debate to something more manageable, rather than trying to analyze each series in any depth, this chapter will give a brief overview of some general trends. When looking at the broader picture, from the 1950s to the modern day, medieval dramas have tended to cluster around three key topics—namely, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and the Crusades—which will each be discussed in terms of their ability to address three key issues of importance to the period dramas. The first issue concerns historical drama’s ability to speak to ideas about national identity and nostalgia, which in the above quotation McArthur argues is primordial. The second is the status of British drama as the flag bearer of quality television, providing an “international brand image of British television as a provider of a certain kind of content: middle-class fare skewed in various ways towards the maintenance and reproduction of a literary and cultural heritage.”[4] The third is the importance, outlined elsewhere in this book, of the past as a means of critiquing, commenting on, or addressing contemporary concerns, which is motivated not by a desire for pure escapism, but instead, as Tony Garnett suggests, “we go into the past to draw lessons from it. History is contemporary.”[5]
Nevertheless, although certain examples of medieval British dramas can be seen to operate functionally in the same way as those depicting later periods, it is also important to note that significant differences exist. To begin with, as noted elsewhere, the Middle Ages by no means occupies an innocent position in the British cultural memory and very often becomes a contested period of British history, used variously to promote nationalistic agendas, or else might be used as a period of barbaric primitivism to be compared unfavorably with the modern day. More problematically, over the course of the last two centuries the period has also become one that is readily fused with ahistorical fantasy worlds such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or the cycle of 1980s sword and sorcery films like Excalibur (1981), Willow (1988), or Dragonslayer (1981), which also affect television depictions of the period seen in, for example, BBC’s Merlin (2008–2012) or HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011– ).[6] As such, some of the series discussed here, such as Sapphire Films’ Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–1959) and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957) or HTV/Goldcrest’s Robin of Sherwood (1984–1986), fall more easily into the fantasy version of the Middle Ages than any serious attempt to resurrect the period. Even so, I hope to demonstrate that, even if the series is not intended to be taken wholly seriously, in some cases the political subtexts of many of them may well have something to say.
The most recurrent medieval theme, and the first to appear on television, is the legend of Robin Hood, who appeared on British television screens as early as 1955 with Sapphire Films’ long-running Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene in the title role alongside a host of other notable British actors including Paul Eddington, Patrick Troughton, Nigel Davenport, Donald Pleasence, and Leslie Phillips. Based as much on the 1938 Errol Flynn film of the same name as anything identifiably medieval, the series offered a fast-paced, action-packed adventure in which Robin battled against the establishment (here interpreted as a tyrannical Norman occupation) to redistribute wealth and champion the downtrodden Saxon population. Though ostensibly positioned as a children’s program, it drew audiences from a range of ages and by 1957 had already been moved into a “prime-time” slot of 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.,[7] and its success allowed it to run through to 1960.
Perhaps the most significant legacy of the series, however, was not to be uncovered until much later, which was that Sapphire Films was later revealed to be the cover for a number of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter, which made the series into “a Trojan Horse that carried Hollywood’s communists into our homes.”[8] The significance and influence of these writers has been well documented elsewhere; however, for our purposes it is worth noting that the series thus not only was a lighthearted caper but also fulfilled, in its way, the kind of contemporary social critique outlined above, most obviously in its emphasis on “social justice, humor and wit, [and] on the constant threat of informing and betrayal.”[9]
In more commercial terms, the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood demonstrated a sizable market for swashbuckling adventure series that would become the hallmark of Sapphire Films and, later, the Danziger brothers’ forays into television, as we shall see below. Curiously, the series was also hailed as a British phenomenon; though in reality a US-UK coproduction, the US influence was often overlooked in a general “insistence on its British origins, qualities, language and settings,” and indeed the success of the series has often been measured not only by its domestic success but also by its ease of export to a ready-made North American audience.[10] As such, the series can be held directly responsible for the sudden appearance of a number of other similar costume adventures such as The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957), The Adventures of William Tell (1958–1959), Ivanhoe (1958), and Sword of Freedom (1958–1961), all of which sought to ape the same format in a range of medieval or early modern settings.
However, despite attempts to replicate the success of Robin Hood in its format, the actual subject of Robin Hood was not to return to British screens for two more decades, excepting Hammer Film’s Wolfshead: The Legend of Robin Hood (1969), which was never broadcast, though the pilot was subsequently released in cinemas as a short film under the same title. In 1975, the BBC tried its own hand at a Sherwood Forest drama with The Legend of Robin Hood, with the lead role filled by Martin Potter. As the first BBC attempt to retell the classic British tale, The Legend of Robin Hood offers an interesting version of Sherwood that, according to Lorraine Stock, was “unusual for being gritty and realistic—no spangled green tights for this Robin.”[11] Despite its uniqueness, however, the series is far closer to Richard Lester’s film Robin and Marian than its TV predecessors, reflecting a wider dissatisfaction with war prevalent in the 1970s, which produced some of the “gloomiest versions of the greenwood legend ever filmed.”[12] The pretextual use of Sherwood thus suggests that in many ways the medieval setting was more incidental than instrumental and served a more serious purpose of social critique.
It was once again ITV that was to breathe new life into the Robin Hood legend in HTV/Goldcrest’s Robin of Sherwood. Unlike the BBC’s interpretation, the series ran from 1984 to 1986 and, according to Stephen Knight, offered “the most innovative and influential version of the myth in recent times,” whose radical reinterpretation of the legend inspired a large and devoted audience.[13] Adopting a thinly veiled political approach to the topic, Richard Carpenter’s Sherwood used the distant medieval past to make some serious arguments about the present, reframing Robin not as an individual struggling against personal adversaries but as a champion of social revolution against a corrupt system. So pervasive is the distrust of authorities that even the return of King Richard, traditionally the signal of the restoration of justice, is shrugged off by the outlaws as merely another political ploy. As Laura Blunk argues, “Much more than any other retelling of the legend, the series stresses resistance to the existing social and political order of medieval England. . . . Authority is respected in Carpenter’s Sherwood only when it earns acceptance by being justly wielded for the good of the community—whether that community be the tightly knit band of outlaws or the people of England as a whole.”[14]
After 1986, and despite his success in two hit series, Robin and his men disappeared for the next two decades from British screens, recrossing the Atlantic for a slew of American productions, most notably three big-screen outings: Kevin Reynolds’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and John Irvin’s Robin Hood (both 1991), followed by Mel Brooks’s parodic Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), alongside the Warner Bros/Baltic Ventures coproduced TV series New Adventures of Robin Hood (1997–1999). Ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, many of these ventures extirpated Robin from history and placed him in fantastic settings amid a legendary greenwood, presumably to capitalize on the popularity of pseudo-historical fantasy series like Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) or Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–1999).
Thus, by the time the BBC was finally to score a hit with a Robin Hood series, this time with its 2006–2009 coproduction with Tiger Aspect, many of the familiar tropes had become fixed elements of a legend very familiar to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing historical realism to take something of a back seat. With Jonas Armstrong in the title role, Robin Hood tracked Locksley’s return from the Crusades, which here was exploited as an opportunity to reconstruct Robin as an enlightened postcolonial leader suffering from posttraumatic stress (coinciding with real-life Western invasions of the Middle East that drew unfavorable comparisons with the Crusades), recruiting an interracial band of outlaws united in their battle against injustice. The backdrop of a deeply unpopular war occasionally proved to offer irresistible parallels for the series writers. In one example, the unrepentant sheriff proposes fresh security measures for Nottingham in the continued “War on Terror”; in another, he makes no attempt to disguise that his chief weapon against the outlaws is that he controls the flow of information to the wider populace, transforming what is traditionally a game of cat and mouse between the sheriff and the outlaws into a reckless pursuit of dangerous terrorists that tramples over the law. The explicit comparison with the Bush-Blair coalition paints the Norman institution in rather broad strokes as a more corrupt system even than that of the 1980s Robin of Sherwood. Where Robin Hood does offer an interesting twist, however, is in its elimination of the kind of infighting witnessed in Robin of Sherwood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, to reframe the band of Merry Men as an indestructible unit in which “Robin Hood” comes to signify much more than the man: the undying (and indestructible) notion of “the people” (prompting numerous scenes in which, like musketeers in Lincoln green, they join hands and claim in unison, “I am Robin Hood”).
The second most common focus of medieval British historical dramas is that of the Crusades and their enduring legacy in British cultural memory. Since the closure of the airwaves during the Second World War meant that the emergence in Britain of a fully fledged television service coincided with the dismantling of the British Empire, perhaps it is no surprise that alongside more explicit reflections on the empire at its zenith, the Crusades offered a ready-made metaphor for European hegemony. Particularly favored in television seems to be the Third Crusade of the late twelfth century, which saw the involvement of several recognizable medieval figures; these include Richard I (the Lionhearted), his brother Prince John (later King John of the Magna Carta fame), Saladin, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as well as familiar fictional characters such as Ivanhoe (a kind of ideal ego of Robin Hood) and, however anachronistically (at least in popular culture), Robin Hood himself.
The first depiction of the Third Crusade on British television comes as early as 1958, with Sydney Box’s Ivanhoe starring Roger Moore as “a typically handsome, athletic and courageous hero fighting for freedom and justice, his actions tempered by tenderness and the desire for comradeship.”[15] This version, rather more MGM than Walter Scott, clearly adopts the same ideological approach as Sapphire’s Adventures of Robin Hood in perceiving late twelfth-century England as a land of tyranny and imperial dominance, in which a regime of Norman aristocrats subjects the native people to oppression and injustice. Although admittedly the series, “crammed with the familiar conventions of a genre that emphasised action and spectacle,”[16] is more in keeping with a matinee costume adventure than a serious historical drama, its reconfiguration of the Third Crusade is nevertheless interesting. In place of his traditional role as defender and symbol of Englishness, Richard I is recast as a rightful king fighting for freedom in foreign lands, but one whose abandonment of his own kingdom leaves him open to criticism. Emerging against a backdrop of the emergence of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the signing of the Treaty of Rome (after which France overtly petitioned against UK entry into the EEC), the series’ rejection of French authority in its implicit championing of the Saxon cause against the so-called Norman yoke (which included the French-born King Richard himself) offers a tempting reading as an unwitting manifesto against European integration as well as a meditation on the loss of English/British national power.
The Third Crusade was reprised only three years later in the Danziger brothers’ Richard the Lionheart (1961) that, given the Danzigers’ traditional style of “gritty social realism and shabby location filming,” had the potential to offer an interesting critique of one of the best-known medieval kings.[17] However, while undoubtedly ambitious in its scope, Wheeler Dixon suggests that the series struggled from the outset to deliver the “period costumes, sword fights, and detailed post-production work” that the series demanded, leading the Danzigers ultimately to abandon the series, apparently midway through its run.[18] Tise Vahimagi’s synopsis on the British Film Institute’s ScreenOnline database neatly summarizes the problems of the series in his suggestion that despite possessing “all of the components necessary for a spectacle,” the scripts and pace of the series were ultimately uncontrolled and lacking in narrative tension.[19]
Accordingly, it was not until the 1980s that the Third Crusade began to offer a solid and multifaceted backdrop to the historical drama, finding a means to address issues of national identity and multiculturalism in both Robin of Sherwood (as discussed above) and a 1982 TV movie of Ivanhoe. The latter, with Anthony Andrews and James Mason starring as Ivanhoe and Isaac of York respectively, was perhaps rather more notable as an expensive and one-off event than as a lasting contribution to Ivanhoe’s legacy. Boasting a range of notable actors, including Sam Neill as Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Olivia Hussey as Rebecca, Julian Glover, John Rhys-Davies, and Michael Horden, as well as an accomplished crew behind the scenes, the shorter running time (at 142 minutes) left little room for character development or any attempt to explore the contemporary significance of the subject matter; more crucially, the all-star cast was to place its budget far out of the reach of most TV series at the time.
The high production values of the series, together with its focus on the Crusades and their effect on England, did however lead to a more memorable version of Ivanhoe in the 1997 A&E/BBC coproduced miniseries with Steven Waddington in the title role; he also played the eponymous king in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). In this version we see the Third Crusade once again operating as a pretextual means of exploring race and identity, emphasizing otherness while at the same time universalizing human experience, most especially in the hero’s struggle against Brian de Bois-Guilbert (superbly played by Ciarán Hinds). Both are warriors back from the Holy Land, and both fall for the Jewish maiden Rebecca (Susan Lynch), making their struggle for the hand of the girl a miniature version of the Crusade itself, only this time played out back in Merrie England. However, one key difference emerges in its translation from the text: in many adaptations of Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe’s choice between the Saxon Rowena and the Jewish Rebecca offers a means of reinforcing English national identity by tying it back to a proto-Saxon identity. Thus, the tension between Saxon and Norman often translates into as much a celebration of the Self as a rejection of the Other, and a means for Ivanhoe to make peace with his Saxon father (read, embrace his rightful national identity). Consequently, as Michael Ragussis puts it, the Ivanhoe story allows us to “explore national identities in Britain through the figure of outlandish outsiders.”[20] In the 1997 series, however, the clash between Bois-Guilbert and Ivanhoe is fought over an empowered Rebecca who eventually chooses neither Bois-Guilbert nor her rescuer Ivanhoe but consciously embraces her own status as outsider. The rejection of both Saxon and Norman identities allows the series to use the Third Crusade not only as a multicultural stick to beat the present by unexpectedly rejecting its implicit support of an expansionist ideology but also as a means of offering empowered female characters who are able to do more than pout longingly at the Crusaders.
A newfound spirit of freedom and questioning of authorities was also in evidence in ITV’s Cadfael, which ran from 1994 to 1996, this time set against the aftermath of the First Crusade and what was effectively a civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda (the same period that The Pillars of the Earth, a US-Canadian coproduction, would depict a decade later). Over three seasons, the Crusader-turned-monk functions as a modern-day detective, solving crimes amid a turbulent and often bloody war of succession; his status as a cloistered monk who has experienced the Crusades firsthand works as a clever narrative device that permits him to act as a dispassionate social commentator on a particularly murky period of Britain’s past. In many of his cases (as with Robin Hood in later iterations), the backdrop of the Crusades allows Cadfael to speak as an enlightened, modern man who has seen the failings of ideology and, coupled with his own background as a Welsh monk operating in an English border town, the breakdown of simplified nationalistic agendas. In many ways, then, Brother Cadfael is perhaps better understood as a man of both the 1990s and the 1130s, offering a nexus through which the present views the past.
The third recurrent theme of British historical dramas on television concerns the legends of King Arthur. As a core image of English national identity, it is perhaps unsurprising that Arthur should appear on British television; what is surprising is how little he does so, appearing as he does in only three British television dramas, and even then how rarely he is depicted as the major character of the series. Despite the occasional use of Arthur in the Second World War, and later his centrality as “an historical icon for post-war British society” in the 1950s,[21] it was Robin Hood and not King Arthur who took primacy in medieval settings. Indeed, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957) does not even place the king as the central character but instead follows Lancelot through a vaguely medieval setting only partly connected with Camelot. As another Sapphire Films’ production following hot on the heels of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the format and structure of the series, as I have argued elsewhere,[22] follows that of Robin Hood and clearly sought to capitalize on the earlier series’ success by placing William Russell into the title role as a defender of a Camelot threatened by dark external forces and concealed internal traitors—once again reflecting the paranoia and distrust among the blacklisted Hollywood writers working for Sapphire.
The first British series to directly feature Arthur himself was thus HTV’s Arthur of the Britons, again an ITV production, broadcast over two seasons from 1972 to 1973, with twenty-four episodes in total. As with other 1970s productions mentioned above, the series radically reassesses Arthur’s legacy, stripping away the layers of legend to reveal a Dark Age warlord battling on two fronts to forge a national identity, struggling both to resist a barrage of Saxon invasions and to unite the disparate leaders of Jutes, Celts, Angles, and Picts against their common enemy. The result, while not wholly a critical success (the series survives better on DVD as a film version made from a patchwork of different episodes), poses an interesting reconfiguration of medieval Britain, offering a sense of ur-nationalism only as a loose, convenient union between different racial groups, rather than the sense of national destiny that many medieval Arthurian narratives try to offer; as a result, the “legendary image of Arthur as a heroic warrior king ruled by destiny is constantly downplayed.”[23]
Later attempts to bring the Arthurian legend to British television (most obviously Shine TV’s Merlin) once again tend to shift their focus away from Camelot and, more importantly, away from the territory of the historical drama and into the fully fledged fantasy series. Consequently Merlin, like Camelot (2011) and Steve Barron’s miniseries Merlin (1998), freely intertwines the real with the fantastic in its focus on dragons, sorcery, and fairy-tale plotlines, and functions less as an examination of the past and more as a parallel medieval world drawing on other popular-cultural depictions, offering a deracinated, transnational version of the Arthurian mythos.
Thus, the use of the Middle Ages on British television presents a complex picture of the period amid a multifaceted, and at times self-contradictory, political and ideological landscape, both then and now. Though grouped around three key themes, it is clear that depictions of the period are by no means static but have evolved considerably over time, reflecting not only changing tastes of audiences but also significant shifts in industrial practices and trends. What began as an often-formulaic style in the costume adventures of Sapphire films designed for export would develop over time into more cynical critiques of the British past in the 1970s and 1980s with an eye to a domestic audience, allowing a more introspective turn in their critiques of national founding myths that would make little sense to foreign audiences. During this same period, however, the emergence of competition both domestically (with the launch of BBC Two and Channel 4) and internationally, along with the greater ease of international syndication, spurred on investment in these historical dramas, transforming medieval dramas into expensive productions with higher production values, and therefore budgets. Indeed, the recent boom in medieval and early modern themes seen in The Borgias (2011– ), The Tudors (2007–2010), Pillars of the Earth (2010), and The White Queen (2013) demonstrates the continued domination of high production values that make “TV movies often seem closer to their feature-film cousins than to their made-for-TV ancestors.”[24] As a result, the recent past has seen an increasing reliance on a coproduction model to fund the series and frequent involvement of international partners, meaning that any immediate focus on the national context is played down in the name of global export. Such a complex production ecology means that—despite their higher production values—recent series like Merlin or Camelot are far less capable of critiquing the present than their predecessors like Arthur of the Britons or Robin of Sherwood.
Implicit in this picture, however, is the historiographical acknowledgment that the past is not simply a collection of facts but rather a process of selection and reassembly. The differences between television’s treatment of the Middle Ages demonstrate that even if the Middle Ages is not the period most readily associated with the period drama, it nevertheless fulfills a useful role in exploring, challenging, adapting, and appropriating the story of Britain in its infancy, and thus offering a similar kind of “usable past” as the later periods under discussion elsewhere. The fact that these series change so radically over time is also indicative of contemporary moods, beliefs, and desires: with the 1950s offering a Middle Ages of heroism and chivalry, we see a degree of nostalgia for a simpler time but also an image of unchecked male hegemony linked to political and physical power. This male power, however, began to be challenged in the 1970s by a more ambivalent depiction of both Arthur and Robin Hood as national heroes, and which were once again challenged by a subsequent generation of medieval-themed dramas that prioritize multiculturalism and criticize British imperial power. Coming and going in waves and cycles, the Middle Ages thus come to serve, paradoxically, both as a distant mirror reflecting (and distorting) a remote period of British history past and as a parallel world from which powerful critiques of contemporary Britain may be launched. The end result suggests that despite their surface differences, British TV dramas may well use the Middle Ages in the same way as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a means to “create an understanding of the issues of the present by putting them in the context of the past.”[25]
James Redmond, Drama and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 220.
Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 111–12.
Ibid., 113; Colin McArthur, Television and History (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 40.
Tom O’Regan, “The International Circulation of British Television,” in British Television: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 304.
Redmond, Drama and Society, 220. Garnett, speaking in the Radio Times, is quoted in Cooke, British Television Drama, 99.
For more on this, see Umberto Eco’s famous essay “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987), 68–72. See also my own discussion of the uses of the period in Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), chap. 7.
Cooke, British Television Drama, 30.
Tom Dewe Mathews, “The Outlaws,” Guardian, 7 October 2006, accessed 3 September 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/. For a more detailed account of the exact involvement of these writers, see Steve Neale’s excellent study, “Swashbucklers and Sitcoms, Cowboys and Crime, Nurses, Just Men and Defenders: Blacklisted Writers and TV in the 1950s and 1960s,” Film Studies, no. 7 (winter 2005): 83–103; see also Neale, “Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: Contributions to Television Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 23, no. 3 (2003): 245–57.
Steve Neale, “Swashbuckling, Sapphire and Salt: Un-American Contributions to TV Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s,” in “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, ed. Peter Stanfield et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 200.
For more on the commercial performance of The Adventures of Robin Hood, see Steve Neale, “Transatlantic Ventures and Robin Hood,” in ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years, ed. C. Johnson and R. Turnock (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2005), 74–80. On an interesting side note to this issue, in his article on the series, James Chapman argues that it was the perception of its Britishness that helped to sell the series back to the United States in the first place. Chapman, “The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Origins of the Television Swashbuckler,” Media History 17, no. 3 (2011): 277.
Lorraine Stock, “Now Starring in the Third Crusade: Depictions of Richard I and Saladin in Films and Television,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Nickolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 114.
Ibid.
Stephen Knight, Robin Hood (Oxford, UK: Wiley, 1994), 239.
Laura Blunk, “Red Robin: The Radical Politics of Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Thomas G. Hahn (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), 30, 33.
Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 162.
Ibid., 161–62.
Wheeler W. Dixon, The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 100.
Ibid., 100–101.
Tise Vahimagi, “Richard the Lionheart (1961–65),” BFI ScreenOnline, 3 September 2012, accessed 8 September 2013, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/.
Michael Ragussis, quoted in Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 87.
Donald L. Hoffman, “Arthur, Popular Culture and World War II,” in King Arthur in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth S. Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 45–58; N. J. Higham, King Arthur: Myth-Making and History (London: Routledge, 2002), 36.
Andrew B. R. Elliott, “The Charm of the (Re)making: Problems of Arthurian Television Serialization,” Arthuriana 21, no. 4 (summer 2011): 53–67.
John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies (London: Routledge, 2003), 11.
Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, eds., Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 66.
Cooke, British Television Drama, 110.
Sabrina Alcorn Baron
Elizabeth I on Television
More contemporary images exist of Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) than of any other monarch who lived prior to the age of photography. These contemporary images were manipulated for political propaganda purposes, lending plasticity to both Elizabeth I’s visual image and her identity. If the portrait, or image, is the essence of the person it represents, that essence or personality becomes equally malleable. Such a flexible image was tailor-made for film and television when they developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Elizabeth I is the English monarch most portrayed in those media.[1] She was a character in one of the earliest motion pictures made in the Anglophone world (1895) and has remained a feature-film character down to the present day.[2] Likewise, in 1938 she was a character in one of the earliest television broadcasts, becoming one of the most durable if adaptable presences in that medium as well.[3]
The primary reason for the creation of the number and nature of Elizabeth I’s images in her lifetime was the necessity to mitigate the fact that she was a woman who had inherited a position specifically intended by God for males. Neither did she fulfill the obligatory early modern female roles (especially in Protestantism) of wife and mother, remaining unmarried and childless her entire life. In fact, she lived in a culture that conceptualized women only as sex objects; as a woman who did not engage in sexual acts, the Virgin Queen was notorious. Moreover, Elizabeth I was a woman who had to fulfill a very visible public role as she aged and became less sexually objectifiable. Many of her portraits were painted as miniatures, to be worn as jewelry by male courtiers in the fashion of a lady’s favor given to a lover.[4] These miniatures have led many to cast the aging queen in the role of the sexually desirable female, sought after by numerous suitors. This situation is often misunderstood, with politically ambitious young men, such as Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, described as seeking sexual, marital relationships with the much older Elizabeth I.[5] In fact, what Essex and many like him wanted was financial favor and political preferment, and since the monarch in control of that largesse was a woman, and since women in sixteenth-century English society were perceived solely as sex objects, male courtiers resorted to the language and rituals of sexualized romantic courtship rather than politicized favor in seeking to achieve their goals.
Unmarried, childless, and queen in her own right, Elizabeth I was to most of her contemporaries and subjects a curiosity, a mystery, and an anomaly, if not an abomination. Thus, the queen’s male ministers engineered her image in order to transcend gender and to make an atypical female monarch approachable for ambitious elite males. They were so successful in this that the art historian William Gaunt wrote that Elizabeth I’s portraits came to “exclude” not just her realistic female image but also “[her] humanity.”[6] Sir Roy Strong, the foremost expert on Elizabeth’s portraits, has argued that images of the queen became icons; universally recognizable symbols; revered objects in their own right, often in place of the queen herself; and what David Grant Moss has called “a trademark, a logo for England itself.”[7]
Portraits of the queen were contrived first to overcome a female encumbering a public, political, by-definition male office and, ultimately, to objectify an aging female ruler by creating a perpetually sexually desirable avatar that was accessible to men.[8] Turning an aging female monarch into an eternally youthful sexualized icon served to reverse the natural life progression of a woman who never married, never reproduced, and experienced menopause. The queen’s state of perpetual youth could also be identified with perpetual virginity since stereotypically virgins were young, unmarried women. It was even more vital to showcase virginity in the case of royal women who were under intense pressure to reproduce. Moss notes a Second World War–era speech given by the future Elizabeth II, twinning her as was often the case with Elizabeth I: “When an unmarried female member of the royal family must make a speech, the words hark back to the last Tudor queen.”[9] Elizabeth I came to be painted with numerous symbols highlighting her sexual purity, as well as a youthful, interchangeable face frozen in time, for example, in the so-called Sieve and Ermine Portraits. She continued to also be painted as Astraea (the just Virgin), Venus (the eternally beautiful goddess of love), and Diana, or Cynthia (the immortal goddess of the moon).[10]
Strong has shown that in the 1590s, many stock images of Elizabeth I were reproduced as separate prints on paper, making them more affordable, and indeed more public—they could be strewn about the streets, or tacked up on the wall in a home, an ale house, or a print seller’s shop. Strong theorizes that many of these prints were based on a miniature painted by Isaac Oliver, considered flawed because it portrayed the queen accurately as an aging woman.[11] In 1596, an order was issued that all unflattering portraits of the queen—in other words those that made her look her actual age—should be destroyed.[12] Although a few portraits exist that depicted Elizabeth realistically in her older years (one by Marcus Gheerats just authenticated in 2013),[13] the very end of her life produced the most symbolic and idealized portraits of all. Most prominent among these is the Rainbow Portrait depicting Elizabeth with her ginger hair loose and flowing under a bride-like headdress; with her skin smooth and unblemished, smiling enigmatically; and with her clothed in a shimmering copper-colored gown decorated with realistic human eyes and ears and a beaded serpent of wisdom holding a heart in its mouth, in her hand a rainbow symbolizing peace with the motto “Non sine sole Iris—No rainbow without the sun.”[14] The queen by this time was sixty-seven with thinning, receding hair, bad teeth, wrinkles, and pockmarks. But in this portrait, she appears as a beautiful, nubile, sexualized young woman, her hair loose around her shoulders in the fashion of virgin brides, indicating sexual availability and desirability.[15] Elizabeth I thus had a kind of inverted Dorian Gray relationship with her portraits: while she aged and became undesirable, her portraits increasingly appeared young and attractive.
Iconized images were how the patriarchal society in which Queen Elizabeth I lived coped with a female who was the chief public figure in the realm. If the female could not be physically altered (or passed over in the succession) to alleviate social dissonance, then the image, the essence of the female, could be transformed. She was depicted as heroic female figures from classical mythology and even the Judeo-Christian Bible (especially the Virgin Mary) and clothed in allegorical symbols, alleviating anxieties provoked by the most visible woman in the kingdom never marrying, never reproducing, experiencing menopause, and becoming sexually undesirable.[16] Unlike other women in the same situation, the queen could not be pushed to the margins of society or banished to a dower house in the country; she was a woman “alone and apart” in the public eye.[17] Scholars, Strong chief among them, have argued that this manipulation of image was a successful political strategy, which allowed an anomalous woman to sit on the throne for forty-six years unmarried, undesirable, unassailable, and unforgettable.[18]
Four centuries later, the plastic image of Elizabeth I was adapted to one of the greatest mechanisms known for manipulating images and personalities: television. She was an obvious character for television, familiar to later ages not only via images but also through drama, opera, poetry, and literature. Two of her first major television appearances were products of great British literary figures: George Bernard Shaw and Sir Walter Scott. Shaw’s one-act play, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1939), was also produced for British television on three subsequent occasions: 1946 (notably on the first day the BBC resumed programming after the Second World War), 1947, and 1955.[19] The next TV show to feature her was Kenilworth (1957), based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott, produced by the BBC in six live thirty-minute episodes aired weekly, and remade in 1967.[20] Shaw’s play was a comedy focusing on illicit sexual relationships in Elizabeth’s court, featuring William Shakespeare, author of the sonnets.[21] Scott’s novel was a stereotypical Victorian historical romance, published in 1821 in three volumes, focusing on sexual relationships in the queen’s court in the form of various love triangles and clandestine marriages involving Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; his first wife, Amy Robsart; his steward; one of Amy’s former suitors; and Queen Elizabeth. Contemporaries believed Leicester had murdered Amy in order to marry the queen. Scott attempted to exonerate them but left some doubt over Elizabeth’s role and knowledge.[22]
From the outset, television cast Elizabeth I in the context of romance, rife with sexual desire and illicit plotting, as well as comedy. As Moss writes, “She is most often used as a cipher upon which current views of women are projected . . . having the same problems but missing the proper solution: the fulfillment of marriage and the surrender of power to a husband.”[23] The titles of the shows are revealing in themselves, referencing one of the greatest romantic mysteries and erotic relationships (the sonnets) along with one of the most notorious love triangles and murder conspiracies (Kenilworth) in English literature. In both of these stories, the fact that Elizabeth I was queen was totally ancillary. It was her gender and her potential as a sex object that was highlighted by Shaw, Scott, and the BBC.[24] These television trends would continue and transform the image of the queen from a successful early modern political icon into a clichéd, sexualized, powerless female.
In 1968, television portrayals of Elizabeth I turned toward more historically accurate depictions. NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame that year presented Elizabeth the Queen, adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s 1930 play, starring Judith Anderson as Elizabeth and Charlton Heston (starring in Planet of the Apes the same year) as Essex. It depicts a romantic, sexualized relationship between the queen, from age fifty-four, and Essex, from age twenty-two. “May-December romances” existed in the sixteenth century, many with the female as the senior partner, mostly for economic reasons. But the relationship between Elizabeth and Essex has been cosmically misunderstood over time because it has been inappropriately romanticized in literature (perhaps most notably by Lytton Strachey),[25] poetry, opera, and another medium audiences look to for the ultimate happy ending, film. Male-female relationships that transcended sexuality were essentially an unknown concept in the Elizabethan era and are arguably still a rare situation today. In the Elizabethan period, older, postmenopausal women were especially viewed as sexually predatory because often their husbands were dead, leaving them without male supervision and sexual partners; they were infertile, infirm, and sexually unattractive, and thus willing to, it was widely believed, enter into pacts with the devil in exchange for sex. Elizabeth and Essex have often been incorrectly presented as the early modern version of “the aging spinster who is foolish enough to fall in love with a much younger man.”[26]
In Elizabeth the Queen, she and Essex engage in sexual banter and romantic encounters. Essex kisses her and calls her a “bitch of brass,” an attack on both her sexual honor and moral character. In another vividly ahistorical moment, Elizabeth visits him before his execution to ask why he could not love her enough (clearly in the romantic sense) to try not to take her kingdom from her. He says he cannot answer because he does not know but allows, “A woman governs better than a man perhaps, being a natural coward,” delivering yet another insult based on her gender.[27] This scene is more than vaguely reminiscent of Bette Davis playing Queen Elizabeth in the 1939 film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, begging Essex, played by Errol Flynn, to take her kingdom in exchange for sexual attention and romantic love.[28] Essex, like all Elizabethan men, knew no other way to approach a woman, even—perhaps especially—a queen but as a sexualized object.
Generally considered to be the best of all television dramatizations about Elizabeth I is 1971’s Elizabeth R, produced by the BBC in six episodes spanning nine hours, with Glenda Jackson in the starring role. As Bethany Latham points out, it is this length of time to explore and develop the story and characters that makes this the best treatment of Elizabeth.[29] It is also very historically accurate. Jackson’s Elizabeth is a calculating and successful head of state, attending Privy Council meetings, writing and signing orders, choosing officials and overruling her male councilors, and beating everyone at political cat and mouse (as well as cards), despite all of the sexist opinions and actions around her. But in the final analysis, this series too highlights that above all else, Elizabeth was a female who was expected to become a wife and mother. The debate about her marriage emerges in the first episode, and three further complete episodes concentrate on Elizabeth’s need to marry as well as her alleged romantic relationships with Leicester (here sorely lacking passion), the French Duc d’Alencon (later Anjou), and Essex (played by Robin Ellis, who would go on to Poldark fame four years later). As William Robison has correctly pointed out, the series significantly downplays the real political problems she faced during her reign.[30]
The iconization of the queen’s image is clearly visible in the series with, in Strong’s words, the “individual” being “transposed into a symbol.”[31] In episode 6, “Sweet England’s Pride,” the queen is essentially a caricature with contrived wrinkles, the white kabuki mask of lead-based face paint, the receding hairline, the stylized wig, darkened teeth (which Jackson insisted on), and fake eyebrows visibly drawn on above her natural ones; looking glasses were banned from her presence, and her clothing and jewelry became more fantastical by the scene. Her relationship with Essex is appropriately portrayed as maternal rather than sexual (if mother-son relationships are asexual), with the queen’s full cognizance: “I will no longer play guilty parent to his hurt child.” Following Essex’s implosion after abandoning his Irish post, Elizabeth meets his petulant, adolescent displays with politic silence, as is historically accurate, rather than pleading for his sexual attention as in film and television. Indeed, Essex in Elizabeth R is the embodiment of Robison’s shrewd observation that Essex has never been acted or portrayed well in any production while Elizabeth I has been portrayed by a long line of great actresses, beginning with Sarah Bernhardt.[32]
For the balance of the 1970s and 1980s, Elizabeth I appeared in British-produced TV shows that were comedies and satires, if not farces, including Graham Chapman in drag (wearing a copy of her dress from the Ditchley portrait) in a more-nonsensical-than-usual segment of Monty Python’s Flying Circus called “Erizabeth L.”[33] A Carry on Laughing episode from 1975, “Orgy and Bess,” was a sexual farce, which needs no explanation beyond the title.[34] Her stint as a comedic character culminated in 1986’s Blackadder II where Elizabeth was played by Miranda Richardson as exceedingly frivolous and eccentric. Richardson introduced that characterization in her audition after forty other actresses had read for the part and been rejected. The creators were so taken with her performance that they rewrote scripts around her portrayal.[35] Moss points out that in the series Richardson’s character is never referred to by name; she is universally recognizable by her red hair, dress, and jewelry, again copied from the Ditchley Portrait.[36] Elizabeth I was presented as a stereotypical sexualized female, attractive but empty-headed; as unrealistically bloodthirsty, beyond the comprehension of the men around her; and as “the redheaded stereotype.”[37]
In the early twenty-first century, television turned to highly fictionalized and sexualized dramatizations of the queen such as Elizabeth Rex (2002), a Canadian production based on a Canadian play in which “drama overtakes the logic of history.”[38] It has yet another revealing title. Elizabeth is referred to as Rex, the Latin word for king, rather than Regina, the Latin word for queen. This usage echoes the medieval and early modern political paradigm of the king, or queen’s, two bodies, the notion that the monarch had not only a physical body, which in Elizabeth’s case was female and weak and sexual, but also a theoretical or political public body, which in the case of all monarchs, regardless of biological sex, was male or at least neuter, and therefore strong.[39] Set after a performance of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing the night before Essex’s execution, this production shows Elizabeth I experiencing gender confusion but ruled by her romantic feelings for Essex. The queen talks with a male actor from the play-within-the-play, who portrays women and has male lovers, asking him to teach her how to be a woman, and in exchange, she will teach him how to be a man.[40] While this particular encounter and overt gender bending is highly unlikely, historical evidence shows that Elizabeth did wrestle with some of these issues and did employ the two-bodies political theory. She frequently referred to herself as “prince,” as for example in 1601’s Golden Speech delivered to a joint session of Parliament, and occupied the king’s rather than the queen’s apartments in Whitehall Palace.
Three years later, two award-winning series aired, hoping to capitalize on recent film portrayals of Elizabeth I: Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen (PBS/Masterpiece Theatre, 2005; BBC, 2006) and Elizabeth I (Channel 4, 2004; HBO, 2005). The first series featured a young unknown cast (who also age little in the series) situating this production within the youth or “emo” movement—rooted in punk, grunge, and gothic—which borrows from Victorian and Elizabethan culture.[41] Fashion and creating a certain look are central tropes of emo and clearly on display here.[42] Elizabeth, played by Anne-Marie Duff, exhibits from the outset the very pale skin prized by emo, which becomes even more pronounced when she dons the white makeup of her later years.[43] Emo’s interest in androgyny is a useful theme for exploring Elizabeth I, with her personal female body and her public male body.
The series concentrates on the queen’s relationship with Leicester, alternately sexually tense and jealously sniping. They frequently meet alone and engage in erotic foreplay, although Elizabeth insists nothing sexually inappropriate ever happened between them. Duff’s Elizabeth is very emotional in very female ways, not just with Leicester, but also in frequent anxiety and panic attacks, hissy fits, and collapsing in bouts of sobbing. When Duff’s Elizabeth is shown dealing with political issues and meeting with her council, she conveys nothing of the historical savvy politician that Glenda Jackson showcased in her performance. Moreover, this series has Elizabeth designing her iconization by instructing an artist as to how she is to be portrayed in portraits: “Let there be no shadows on my face and neck because they accentuate age. Immortal is the look we’re after sir. And virginal. Divinity if you can manage it. And my hair must be loose.”
Maternal rhetoric and imagery are used in some interesting ways in this production, with Elizabeth shown longing for a child, to fulfill the early modern role assigned to women, if primarily to secure the succession and protect England. Leicester reminds her of a childhood vow to never marry and asks, “Would you forgo motherhood, Bess, for the sake of a childish vow?” She responds to him with a discursion on the two sides of her coinage representing the queen’s two bodies. Elizabeth is shown undergoing a gynecological examination in order to prove she is virginal and fertile and therefore acceptable as a bride for Anjou. Told the positive results, she falls back on her bed, with an adolescent smile and sigh of relief. Elizabeth talks to Essex of unconditional mother’s love and reminds him that when he first met her as a child, she frightened him. Essex (portrayed here as a petulant, unstable adolescent with emo-style lank greasy hair hanging in his face, wearing leather pants) kisses her palm and proceeds to erotically suck her fingers; she flinches in horror. Notably in this series, Essex is manipulated more by his biological mother—Lettice Knollys Devereaux Dudley (Leicester’s second wife), a curious Elizabeth doppelgänger—than he is by his political mother, the queen.[44]
Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons, was wildly popular in the UK, picked up by HBO in the United States and also broadcast in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, garnering multiple awards from ten organizations including the Emmy, Peabody, Golden Globe, Screen Actors’ Guild, and BAFTA awards.[45] Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen was actually broadcast first in the United States to avoid competition with this series starring household-name actors. The series is built around the queen’s two alleged great love affairs, with Leicester (Irons) and his stepson Essex (Hugh Dancy). It begins when Elizabeth I was forty-two years old (Mirren was in her sixties), opening with the gynecological exam that proved she was still a virgin and fertile, although at that age, the queen was on the cusp of the average life expectancy for females at the time. Ironically, her chances of living longer were improved because she was not having children when childbirth was the leading cause of death for women.
For such a distinguished actress, Mirren disappoints in this series. She famously played Deputy Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (a woman in a man’s profession who has problems with romantic love and motherhood), in Prime Suspect (ITV, 1991–2006), for the same director, Tom Hooper, fighting against the glass ceiling firmly in place for women at Scotland Yard. She subsequently portrayed Elizabeth II on film (The Queen, 2006) as a high-minded monarch severely lacking the common touch. But her Elizabeth I comes across as snide, shallow, and shaky, displaying postmodern bitchiness, frequently screaming and swearing like a fishwife, and physically assaulting the men in her court who displease her in any way. She constantly dissolves into hysteria even while presiding in the Privy Council. Her relationship with Leicester is presented as emotional and sexual, with Leicester protective and Elizabeth very much in need of protection. This series veers away from the historical record in many ways, beginning with the premise of two grand romances for the queen, not to mention Elizabeth secretly meeting with Mary, queen of Scots (arranged by Leicester) and later her son, James VI (arranged by Robert Cecil). Mirren’s Elizabeth even gets the degree of blood relationship between herself and the queen of Scots wrong. The series also has her personally facing down Essex and his rebels. Indeed the queen is often so brainless here that some of the best lines from her historical reign are fed to her by men, for example, when she tells Leicester prior to the Tillbury speech that she has no idea what to say to the troops because she is an “unwarlike woman,” and he responds she will know what to say because she has “the heart and stomach of a king.”
Elizabeth I’s relationship with Essex is also played as a sexualized romance, with the queen “genuinely smitten” with the much younger man, and the “policies of the English government . . . a function of which boys the queen likes.”[46] In a markedly ahistorical deathbed scene, Leicester links their hands and tells Essex to take care of Elizabeth because she needs looking after.[47] But the element of romance does not ring true with Elizabeth’s lascivious posturing among the ladies of her court, taunting Essex’s future wife, Frances Walsingham Sidney, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, and constantly pointing out to Essex that he is nothing but a boy who owes everything to her. She comes across, as one blogger has written, as “an adolescent girl trapped in her grandmother’s body.”[48] When Elizabeth and Essex are alone, drinking wine, reclining on cushions in front of an open fire, and he attempts to seduce her because he says she is looking at him as if she wants to eat him, she breaks away. She displays stereotypical female fickleness, torn between her duty as queen and her sexual desires as a woman, with the latter frequently threatening to dominate. Even when the queen ultimately tells him they must be friends as she and Leicester were in the end, Essex insists he wants a love relationship with her.[49] Despite the ratings and awards for this series, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley was correct when she wrote, “This interpretation, like so many others, wallows in the painful self-pity of a powerful, aging woman who craves true love.”[50] The iconization of Elizabeth I is treated intriguingly in this series, perhaps because Mirren was the same age as the historical queen at that point in her reign. Mirren as the aging Elizabeth, even when unmade up, is not at all horrible looking; she bears the age well. The fantastically dressed, white-faced, bewigged queen appears in this production only at important public or state events.
Elizabeth’s television appearances elsewhere in the 2000s reside in the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–1989, 2005– ), where she first had a cameo in 1965. She reappeared enigmatically at the end of “The Shakespeare Code” (2007) set in 1599, announcing the doctor was her sworn enemy and ordering her guards to kill him based on her knowledge of his earlier behavior toward her, which in true Doctor Who time-bending fashion would not be revealed until future episodes. In 2009’s “The End of Time: Part One,” the Doctor reveals, “Got married . . . to good queen Bess, let me tell you her nickname is no longer (coughs) never mind.”[51] Doctor Who fandom was not at all sure how to deal with the implication that the asexual Doctor had deflowered the second most notorious virgin in the history of Western women. The Doctor’s sexual relationship with Elizabeth I was confirmed in “The Beast Below” (2010). Liz 10, revealed to be the very fictional Queen Elizabeth X (wearing a mask that makes her look old because her natural aging process had been stopped to keep her young), names Elizabeth I as one of her ancestors acquainted with the Doctor and discloses that he eradicated her virginity.[52] The Doctor divulged in 2011’s “The Wedding of River Song” that “Liz the first is waiting in a glade to elope with me,” indicating he had left her at the altar, or he planned to bigamously marry River Song in that episode. The Doctor’s relationship with Elizabeth I was as convoluted as the series itself but always portrayed as sexual.
One of the major plotlines of “The Day of the Doctor” (2013), celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Doctor Who franchise (the largest simulcast in history, airing in 94 countries and 1,500 theaters worldwide), had the Doctor trying to distinguish the real Elizabeth I from a Zygon.[53] The queen had left orders for him, received in 2013, to come back to 1562 to help foil the Zygon plot to take over earth. Ultimately, the Zygon threat is eliminated and the Doctor and Elizabeth I go off to get married. Again a sexual relationship between the two is exposed when one of the Doctor’s many incarnations muses to another, “Oh, good work, Doctor. Nice one. The Virgin Queen? So much for history.” The multiplicities in this special are as inherent as in the series as a whole. For example, the show references the many symbolic portraits of Elizabeth I by having her create an Underground Gallery to house dangerous art, including a fictional portrait of her indicative of the Zygon threat to earth; arguably, some of her actual historical portraits might qualify to hang in this gallery.[54] Although science fiction is a genre in which women are generally accorded the same, or even greater capabilities than men, and even in a series with a puritanical hero who neither swears nor engages in sex, once again Elizabeth I is a sex object, and a humiliated one at that (one reviewer noting strong parallels with Elizabeth I of Blackadder II),[55] rather than a powerful political figure.
The argument in this chapter is that the image and thus the essence of Queen Elizabeth I was manipulated in her lifetime to ensure that she transcended her femaleness to succeed as a public political figure in an overtly patriarchal office and culture. But quite ironically in a postmodern Western world informed by feminism, television has reshaped, or desacralized, Elizabeth I into a sexualized female stereotype who failed at love and motherhood, and thus did little else of consequence. She is portrayed as unsuccessful in the achievements most desirable to women, reverting to the age-old stereotype of the female as inherently flawed, inferior, and oversexed.
As with the manipulation of the queen’s portraits in the early modern era, so her portrayals in television series have allowed “images” to “replace reality and the distinction between reality and irreality [sic] blurs.”[56] It was recognized as early as 1948 “that the primary impact of exposure to mass communication is likely to be not change but maintenance of the status quo.” Moreover, the famous television theorist George Gerbner has argued further that television is a medium that “reproduces the status quo in a highly conservative manner” and serves the interest of the ruling class[57]—in other words, the wealthy males who continue to dominate and control our society despite women being supposedly closer to equality with men than ever before in Western history. Neither television nor contemporary society appears to have any idea how to deal with Elizabeth I as a visible, aging, postmenopausal, nonsexualized woman. In her own time she was turned into an icon, a sacred image, to overcome the natural processes of aging, while our time has turned her into a caricature that is frequently ridiculed and humiliated sexually.
“Ten Facts About Queen Elizabeth I,” Ten Facts About . . . , 2014, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.tenfactsabout.co.uk/; “Elizabeth I of England,” New World Encylopedia, last updated 25 July 2013, accessed 1 April 2014, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/.
Sue Parrill and William B. Robison, “About the Films,” TudorsOnFilm, 2012, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.tudorsonfilm.com/.
“The Virgin Queen,” TV Tropes, accessed 1 April 2014, http://tvtropes.org/.
Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 70–75.
Strong, for example, believes that Elizabeth and Essex had a romantic relationship. Ibid., 67–81. Latham takes a firm stand on the fence on the nature of their relationship. Bethany Latham, Elizabeth I in Film and Television: A Study of the Major Portrayals (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), Kindle loc. 1722.
William Gaunt, Court Painting in England from Tudor to Victorian Times (London: Constable, 1980), 37.
Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 16; David Grant Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?: Elizabeth I as an Icon for the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 5 (2006): 798.
“Representing the Queen,” National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.rmg.co.uk/.
Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?,” 807.
Strong, Gloriana, 87; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 44–48; “Representing the Queen.”
Elizabeth I actually sat for Oliver, and even though the portrait(s) were considered flawed, Strong believes Oliver’s pattern image to be the most accurate portrayal of the queen from this time in her life. Strong, Gloriana, 142–45.
Ibid., 147.
Jonathan Jones, “Elizabeth I’s Portrait Brings Us Face to Face with the Ravages of Age,” The Guardian, 12 February 2013, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/.
Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 50, 52; Strong, Gloriana, 156–60; The Rainbow Portrait, ca. 1600, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, UK.
Loose hair was ironically the identifier of both unmarried virgins and prostitutes, or women who were sexually available.
S. P. Cenasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 2–4.
Latham, Elizabeth I, Kindle loc. 277.
Strong, Gloriana, 35–36.
Sue Parrill and William B. Robison, The Tudors on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 38–39.
Video of this production does not survive, but it featured Jeremy Brett (later the star of Sherlock Holmes) as Amy’s suitor and Gemma Jones (later starring in The Duchess of Duke Street) as Queen Elizabeth. Ibid., 124.
Ibid., 38–39.
“Kenilworth,” Walter Scott, Edinburgh University Library, last updated 20 July 2012, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/.
Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?,” 798–99.
Between these two shows, Elizabeth I was featured in The Bachelor Queen (1948), a live broadcast of a play produced for NBC’s Television Playhouse. The title is a dead giveaway, focusing on her unmarried state. According to the plot, Elizabeth realized that if she was to succeed as queen, she could not succeed through normal female behavior. Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 23.
Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928).
Postmodern society in the main does not have this diabolical view, but menopausal women are still “othered” in our society, not at all well understood, because for the first time in history, significant numbers of postmenopausal women, women no longer considered acceptable sex objects by males, have long life spans. Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?,” 798.
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 83–84.
Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?,” 798.
Latham, Elizabeth I, Kindle loc. 3717.
Elizabeth R, Netflix, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.netflix.com; Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 65.
Strong, Gloriana, 9.
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 11.
“Erizabeth L,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, YouTube, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.youtube.com/; Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?,” 804. The Ditchley Portrait was painted for Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, one of Elizabeth’s champions. The portrait was given to the National Portrait Gallery, London, by one of his descendants in 1932.
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 158–59; “Orgy and Bess,” Carry On Wiki, accessed 1 April 2014, http://carryon.wikia.com/.
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 23.
Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time?,” 796.
Latham, Elizabeth I, Kindle loc. 253.
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 78–79; Iris Winston, “Review: Elizabeth Rex,” Variety, 10 July 2000, accessed 1 April 2014, http://variety.com/.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession, Royal Historical Society Studies in History (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977); Regina Schulte, The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500–2000 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 78–79.
Robison also noticed they were slow to age on screen. Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 9; Luke Smith, “British Youth Timeline,” Prezi, 5 April 2012, accessed 1 April 2014, http://prezi.com/.
“Emo Scene Fashion including Emo Hair, Clothing, Makeup and Accessories,” SoEMO.co.uk, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.soemo.co.uk/. Prior to this series, Duff’s most notable role was in the UK version of Shameless (2004– ), where she played the young heroine Fiona Gallagher who was also victimized because of her gender.
Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen, Netflix, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.netflix.com/.
Parrill and Robison, Tudors on Film, 50.
Adam Cadre, “Elizabeth I,” 31 December 2012, accessed 20 January 2014, http://www.adamcadre.ac/.
Elizabeth I, part I, YouTube, accessed 29 March 2014, http://www.youtube.com/.
Cadre, “Elizabeth I.”
Elizabeth I, part II, YouTube, accessed 30 March 2014, http://www.youtube.com/.
Alessandra Stanley, “Elizabeth I: The Flirty Monarch with the Iron Fist,” New York Times, 21 April 2006.
“Elizabeth I,” Tardis Data Core, Wikia, accessed 1 April 2014, http://tardis.wikia.com/.
“The Virgin Queen,” TV Tropes; “The Beast Below,” Wikipedia, last updated 3 September 2014, accessed 1 April 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/; “The Fourth Dimension,” Doctor Who, BBC One, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/; Dave Golder, “Doctor Who ‘The Beast Below’ In-Depth Review,” SFX, 21 April 2010, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.sfx.co.uk/; “Quotes from Doctor Who: ‘The Beast Below,’” Planet Claire, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.planetclaire.org/.
“The Day of the Doctor (TV Story),” Tardis Data Core, Wikia, accessed 1 April 2014, http://tardis.wikia.com/.
“Elizabeth I,” Tardis Data Core.
Jim Shelley, “Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary Episode Breaks the Timelord’s Number One Rule and Re-writes History—and Reminds Us Why Matt Smith and David Tennant Were So Irritating,” Daily Mail , 23 November 2013, accessed 1 April 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.
Douglas Kellner, “Toward a Critical Theory of Television,” 6–7, 13, accessed 1 April 2014, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/.
George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorelli, “Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process,” in Perspectives on Media Effects, ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1986), 21.
Mark Fryers
The Onedin Line and the Changing Waters of
British Maritime Identity
Producer Peter Graham Scott describes the situation at the BBC in the early 1970s as “leaderless.”[1] Rather than taking risks with contemporary shows, he writes, “drama began to look backward to the Victorian era and the certainty of the Second World War.” However, one show did appeal to Scott, and he subsequently became producer on The Onedin Line (1971–1980), which he described as “embracing the strong popular lure of the ocean with a chance to expose the cruel hardships and ruthless ambition that dominated Victorian life.”[2] The show did exactly that and went on to become one of the BBC’s most popular programs, not just in Britain but also successfully exported as far afield as North America, Australia, Zambia, Singapore, and Jordan. The balance of sea romance and urban deprivation enabled the show to blend elements, retaining the splendor and familial intrigue of the costume drama with sea adventure, spectacle, and the exotic evocation of Britain’s maritime heritage. This chapter will discuss the show’s particular use of spaces, the delimination and transgression of generic boundaries, and its use of dramatic juxtaposition to suggest that, through the use of television’s specific visual and presentational mechanics, The Onedin Line offered an often dramatic reinterpretation of British maritime identity on British (and international) screens. The program facilitated the metamorphosis of maritime symbols of national identity, from naval and military dominance to notions of an empire built by the harshness and vagaries of mercantile endeavor.
As an island nation, Britain has long been associated with the sea. As Susan Rose writes, “It has been suggested that there is hardly a single poem written in Anglo-Saxon which is not full of images of the sea.”[3] The Spanish Armada was something of a turning point for English (and later British) national identity, as it marked the beginning of a cultural fascination with both maritime success as being vital to the wealth and security of the British nation and the idea of “difference” and “exceptionalism” predicated on both cultural and geographical factors. The defeat of Catholic Spain and France enabled Britain to continue uninhibited with Protestantism, with its unique religion (Church of England) to match its unique liberty, monarchy, and judiciary. Britain was a nation, literally set apart from mainland Europe geographically, and this difference was also expressed as a cultural “uniqueness” in such fields as the English language, humor, and even its morality (characterized by a sense of “fair play”).[4] Britain’s empire was protected by its navy and the unique character of the men who sailed in it, all facilitated by the concept of island and isolation. This sense of difference arguably reached its apex during the Second World War, when the rhetoric of Churchill’s speeches galvanized this myth as powerful propaganda.
Scholars have been slower than might have been expected to trace the lineage of maritime and island nation to formations of national identity and character, but in recent years the cause has been taken up in various fields including film. Jonathan Rayner has focused on the way that film and the Royal Navy have been used to express ideas of national identity,[5] while Victoria Carolan has expanded this to consider the wider role of the maritime and British film.[6] Likewise, Penny Summerfield acknowledges the different representation of the Merchant Navy in 1940s and 1950s British Second World War films.[7] From the silent era until the early 1960s, the navy has been a constant presence on British film, from early “prenarrative” films featuring fleet reviews and ship launches to the Ministry of Information–approved naval films of the Second World War, during which the film industry provided a vital cultural propaganda arm to the Royal Navy. The navy, particularly from Victorian times onward, often served as a shorthand for the stratified levels of power and servitude in British society and was emblematic of the British virtues of courage, stoicism, discipline, and dignity.[8] A “continuity of tradition” therefore marked the British relationship with the sea and its practices.
This suffered a precipitous decline after 1960, with the number of sea and navy films reduced drastically. The majority of depictions were henceforth historic rather than contemporary, looking back on past glories while Britain was dwindling rapidly on the world’s stage, supporting a “phantom empire” of inflated importance. The historic myth of Britannia “ruling the waves” was routinely mobilized in times of national security (the “cod” wars with Iceland [1950s and 1970s] and the Falklands conflict [1982] as examples), while the myth that Britain is a small island with a big influence continues to this day.[9] Such evocations of maritime identity are typical even within the tourist industry, which Ken Lunn and Ann Day describe as “a tendency to drift into a wider symbolism”; they suggest, for example, that the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth’s recent bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar “will, no doubt, raise yet again the image of Nelson as an ahistorical figure, one who transcends time and who comes to symbolise a peculiarly British ‘character,’ perpetual and unchanging.”[10] Again, a continuity of tradition would seem to typify the strength of symbolic myth.
Television, often seen as film’s poorer relation, was the perfect vessel through which to energize old myths and, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, churned out swashbucklers such as The Buccaneers (1958–1960), Sir Francis Drake (1961–1962), and Hornblower (1964), all aimed primarily at a juvenile audience for whom the exploits of these maritime adventurers presumably held more relevance than for their adult counterparts. Yet while contemporary depiction of the navy in film became almost nonexistent, it was more visible on television. The BBC drama Warship, which ran from 1973 to 1977, had the full cooperation of the admiralty, which loaned them numerous ships and planes for filming. The Onedin Line sought to fill a large gap in the British public for the romance of the age of sail. Yet the show achieved much more than this by suggesting that modern mercantile Britain was forged as much by the men (and women) of the Merchant Navy than by the men of the Royal Navy.
The program navigated less-explored “maritime spaces” and therefore articulated and gave prominence to a maritime Britain outside of the “Trafalgar” mentality. Over the nine years of its run, the central character, James Onedin (Peter Gilmore), built up a shipping empire from nothing, lost and won it back on more than one occasion, and traveled the world meeting danger and subterfuge in both his maritime and his business life. He lost two wives, one to diphtheria and another in childbirth, as well as having a stillborn child. He fought continually with business nemeses, including his sister Elizabeth (Jessica Benton), who ended up owning a rival shipping line through marriage to sea captain Daniel Frazer (Philip Bond). His lust for profit meant that he became embroiled in many of the important global events of the latter nineteenth century, including revolution in Brazil and Venezuela, the American Civil War, and the communard occupation of Paris; he was even responsible for carrying Garibaldi back into Italy after his exile. Onedin was not interested in politics unless it affected his business interests, and this became the dramatic impetus for his various conflicts. Originally airing on a Friday evening, the show fast became a Sunday-evening fixture on BBC One, with ITV eventually resorting to broadcasting The Love Boat in the same time slot.[11]
It is undeniable that The Onedin Line foregrounds the form of maritime heritage that may be typified as “nostalgic.” The full power of this is derived from its visual and aural presentation and its juxtaposition against the series’s other elements. From the opening titles, which featured the visual and aural contiguity of Khachaturian’s romantic Spartacus theme against shots of the series’s featured ships majestically sweeping through the seas, the presentational paradigm of both the sea and sailing ships as fetishized objects of beauty is established. Here, the visual medium evokes Britain’s heritage of landscape, and particularly maritime painting. Specifically, the romantic notion of the sea as “sublime” so famously evoked by J. M. W. Turner is replicated with the added power of music. Turner was less interested in naval supremacy than he was with the inspiring power of nature, or as Sarah Monks describes, “The sea was emphatically assigned the status of testing ground for a self able to convert the world into indicative sensual experience.”[12]
The beginning of each episode is almost exclusively established at sea—aboard ship, at docks, or at shorelines—and each episode features interstitial establishing chapters where the ship, the sea, and the refrain of Spartacus coalesce to perform the ritual function of nautical panacea. To take the episode “No Smoke without Fire” (6:1) as an example of this style, the episode opens aboard ship as sailors busy themselves to the sounds of seagulls and a lone accordion player, while an old sailor shows a novice how to tie a sheepshank. The episode then goes below decks into James Onedin’s cabin as he discusses the business of gold bullion and South African mining. Once “business” is concluded, the action is back on deck again as the ship sets sail with the sound of a “heaving” sea chantey audible over a montage of shots of sailors at work in rigging, hauling ropes, and setting sails. The chantey is gradually faded in to the nondiegetic Spartacus refrain as wide shots of the ship at full sail conclude the sequence. The action then moves into the more functional and mundane offices of the Frazer Shipping Line and dockyard as the aspiring young businessman William Frazer (Marc Harrison) announces, “I want forty of the men laid off straight away.” The contrast between the two sequences is pronounced, with the romance of the sea and the life of a seaman truncated by the prosaic business of redundancies: the Machiavellian scheming of the land. These interstitial sequences are not just purely decorative but also fulfill an ideological function to elide these contrasts.
The episode continues in this vein as further sequences of the Machiavellian scheming of Victorian business are contrasted with nautical romance. A sequence that deals with Elizabeth Frazer’s strained business dealings is followed by a full ten-second sequence of a ship sailing and the Spartacus theme. It was clearly the view of the creators to establish this contrast and heighten it through the proper implementation of nautical verisimilitude. Here, male authorship is crucial. A BBC press release from the 1970s sums up the aims of the creator and “ex-sailor” Cyril Abraham: “In the Onedin Line, for which he has also written several scripts, he has drawn on his long study of maritime history to tell a story that combines the glamour of the square-rigged sailing ships of the 1860’s with action, adventure and a realistic view of the harshness of Victorian Life.”[13]
This strategy is echoed by original producer and occasional director Peter Graham Scott, who served on the first three seasons. He indicated that each fifty-minute episode “should give us about ten minutes action at sea.”[14] Scott went to great lengths and expense to create the exterior shots, filming ships from helicopters, in all weather conditions and locations to create a “library” of shots to fulfill this function, believing that without this endeavor The Onedin Line would have “sunk unnoticed after one run.”[15] Like many of the writers and directors on the series, Scott had previous experience filming at sea, having worked on Sir Francis Drake, so he shared a collective vision of what the maritime could and should look like on television. It is unsurprising perhaps that the version of the maritime in The Onedin Line should have a masculine association.
This association is likewise dramatically emphasized in the themes, narrative, and characterization. Onedin is a man made tough by the sea. It has engendered a rigid individuality that sets him at odds with everyone he comes into contact with; he is an English cowboy whose ranch is the sea and whose empire is not land and property but ships and cargo. Yet perhaps more than James, the most enduring and endearing character is Captain Baines (played by Howard Lang, an ex-naval gunner), Onedin’s faithful servant. Baines, more than any other character, represents the old sea salt, made tough by the sea but uncomfortable with the affairs of land. Unlike Onedin, he has heart and humanity and represents what may be best described as a true English oak adrift at sea. This, of course, has its roots in Britain’s literary heritage with sea texts like Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Treasure Island (1883), prescribed as “the energising myths of Empire”: boys-own stories to produce “men.”[16] Episode 6:1 perfectly adumbrates the sensibility. In a discussion regarding the possible opening of a Panama Canal, Daniel Fogarty (Tom Adams) declares “and that will be the end of the sailing ship.” This is greeted with lamentation from Baines, for whom sailing round the horn is not only the mark of a true sailor and test of a man but also a masculine rite of passage: “When that happens, no more real men. Just milk sops. Canal sailors.”
The same episode coincidently features what was known as the Neptune Ceremony, a nautical tradition for sailing past the equator in which two sailors dress up as Neptune and his wife and humiliate unfortunate victims. One of the unfortunates in this sequence is a young lad who is dunked in water and forcibly shaved, while Baines and Onedin look on smirking, recalling their own experiences of this degrading spectacle as a masculine initiation. The sea, ships, and sailing therefore create a nexus of masculinity, bearing comparison to Christine Geraghty’s description of real and symbolic space in 1950s maritime war films as a “masculine world operating in a clearly defined and separate ‘space.’”[17]
The sea, ships, and sailing, and their proximity to definitions of British masculine identity invite further comparisons with the American Western film, typified by a national mythology allied to strong and silent men made tough by the landscape.[18] Here, the sea represents the masculine frontier: a place of both romance and danger, whose successful navigation is a masculine “rite of passage.” Both production and reception materials support this. Speaking of the show, Peter Graham Scott stated, “I like the sea, every Briton likes the sea—it’s one of those really root things with the people of these islands,”[19] and Shaun Usher from the Daily Mail described “oceans for prairies and wind jammers replacing horses.”[20] Similarly, reviewing the show in the Daily Telegraph, Sylvia Clayton described it as “one of the few adventures to use the sea as a kind of frontier background,” adding, “There are few sights more beautiful than the clipper in full sail.”[21] Elsewhere, reviewers routinely praised the authenticity of the series and its nautical heritage, suggesting a continuity of national tradition.
However, while The Onedin Line clearly both used and foregrounded romantic notions of British maritime identity and engaged with imperial masculine and other literary conceptions of the sea as being both in the blood and character of the archetypal British man, it still differed significantly from earlier projections of British maritime identity, offering a more diffuse and complicated notion of British national identity than previously found in imperial adventures. Perhaps the most striking feature of this is the manner in which the Royal Navy, so strongly associated with national pride and identity, is almost entirely absent in both thought and deed over the ninety-one episodes. There are three main characters who represent the navy during the series, and none can claim much respect or credit. Onedin’s father-in-law, Webster (James Hayter), is an old naval captain and makes intermittent appearances until series 3. He is a curmudgeon, ill tempered, and set in his ways. Episode 3:3 has Webster go head-to-head with Captain Baines on a voyage regarding the correct protocol for sailing, the suggestion being that Merchant Navy masters and Royal Naval captains are from two different worlds. In series 7, Sarah Onedin (Mary Webster, the widow of James’s brother Robert) is romanced by an ex-naval frigate commander who “fought at Sebastopol,” but he turns out to be purely after her money and is sent packing by James. Perhaps the most odious advocate of naval imperialism appears in episode 2:9 in the form of diplomat Sir Charles Gray (John Harvey), who tries to intervene with James and Albert Frazer doing business helping to provide ships for a Turkish fleet, calling it “treason.” He seeks to keep down every nation but Britain, proclaiming, “Gold on our plates, dung on theirs.” It is James Onedin himself who perhaps illustrates the difference in attitude when he chides a young ship’s boy for incorrectly giving him a naval salute, which involves him standing back on his heels: “It’s not the navy—we don’t stand back to stand upwards.” The message is clear: the navy has its place, but the upward trajectory of Britain was consistently predicated on the merchant ships that carried goods back and forth all over the world, and the men who sailed them were the ones who built Britain. As Summerfield suggests of filmic depictions of the Merchant Navy, “Its presence on screen was disruptive: the complex class, gender, and racial identities with which it was associated undermined the secure portrayal of national unity.”[22]
Although the sea is treated as a space of enterprise and fortitude, of sublimity and romance, it is also a space of danger and death, and destruction and disaster. The heritage industry (including film and television) is often criticized for sanitizing history and making it romantic and easily digested,[23] but The Onedin Line does not shrink from showing the full horror of life for the common seaman and the relatives they left on land. At least two episodes concern themselves with the practice of “coffin ships” in which unscrupulous owners deliberately overload unseaworthy ships and send them out into hazardous waters where they founder and sink, taking their crew with them, in order to claim insurance. Sailors and immigrants suffer death and injury, have limbs mangled and amputated, and catch dysentery, yellow fever, cholera, and sleeping sickness, among numerous other diseases; and with highly flammable and explosive cargoes, danger and depredation is never far away. Episodes also deal with the attempts to form unions to improve sailors’ pay and conditions, strikebreakers, and the establishment of missions and orphanages to help the lot of the sailor and his family. Another common theme is the practice of “crimping” or “shanghaiing” unsuspecting sailors or landsmen by getting them drunk or beating them and forcing them aboard ship as crew. Similarly, several episodes also deal with slavery and the slave trade. The series did not shy away from depicting the atrocity of establishing capitalist spaces.
Yet despite this, the sea is still home to the merchant crews and their space of identification. In episode 3:1, when Samuel Plimsoll himself declares that he is determined to help “that most miserable creature—the British seaman,” James responds by saying, “I think you’ll find that seaman would prefer no other life.” The national maritime identity here, therefore, is expressed not as the actions or deeds of fighting men of the navy, bound to institution and nation or the arcane symbols of nationhood expressed by the defeat of the Armada or Trafalgar, but by the commonality of experience shared by men and their communal day-to-day lives. The “lure of the sea” is not just a symbolic myth or a passive adjunct of the “tourist gaze” but a learned and tactile experience. The symbols of national identity migrate and morph in The Onedin Line from simple class-bound projections of institutional and national servitude to symbols less simple but no less potent, which foreground the tensions between sea and land. The landscape for which Higson and others describe as articulating a British national identity are not the bucolic landscapes of green fields and rolling pastures but the endless, undulating ocean and the liminal spaces of docks and shorelines in between.[24]
The question manifests, therefore: what is it about The Onedin Line that created the space for this difference in conceptions of British identity and the maritime? One obvious difference lies in its televisual format. The advantage of the long-running series is the ability to develop themes and characters with nuance, which fluctuate over time, and even confound expectation. Cyril Abraham is quoted in The Radio Times as stating, “First it [Onedin] broke all the rules, for a series is essentially anecdotal in form and content, each episode telling a complete story. Onedin had the construction of a novel, in which the characters were involved in continuing development.”[25]
This “novel” approach (along with the series lasting nine years) allowed for intricate stories and ensemble casting and for the audience to grow alongside the characters—a luxury not afforded to the myriad maritime-themed films that had proliferated in Britain until the 1960s. As pointed out, these tended to foreground the exploits of the navy at their core, but others that tackled other nautical themes—for example, shipbuilding (Red Ensign, 1934), smuggling (The Ship that Died of Shame, 1951), or whaling (Hell Below Zero, 1954)—were generally restricted to this narrow focus due to the film’s standard running time of approximately an hour and a half.
Arguably the show’s prestige status of “costume drama” allowed it to straddle boundaries. Again, the way the show juxtaposed different elements, like the adventure of sailing and the land-based mercantile activities, powerfully emphasized the tensions at the heart of nineteenth-century Britain. The show’s use and arrangement of space exemplified this, with Liverpool docks representing the liminal boundary between the freedom and adventure of the seas on the one hand and the restrictions of society, business, and familial relations on land on the other. At the same time as the visual beauty and nautical panacea of sailing ships and the sea gave dramatic visual splendor to the maritime sequences, the land sequences functioned with an equal verisimilitude, and the female costumes in particular provided their own decorative splendor. This clearly allowed producers to appeal to multiple audiences. Put in simple binary terms, these were an intended male audience craving action and adventure and a female audience more interested in drawing rooms, costumes, and domestic drama.
The female characters in The Onedin Line also tended to elide different boundaries. While the sea sequences were dominated by males, women tended to dominate the other spaces, and James’s first wife, Anne, and his sister Elizabeth were highly visible and highly vocal presences both on ships and in dockyards and business spaces, troubling the gendered boundaries of these masculine spaces. The odds were skewed in favor of male authorship with only one episode penned by a female writer and one directed by a female (Elaine Morgan wrote episode 2:3, “A Woman Alone,” and Moira Armstrong directed 1:3, “Other Points of the Compass”), but the emphasis on active rather than passive females dominated the series, despite the period setting. By eliding boundaries between the costume drama and the sea adventure, The Onedin Line conflated two versions of history: the “sanctioned version of the past” with what Alison Light describes as “that other history, a history from inside.”[26] Light elaborates that this version of history privileges the place of private life in the national context, entwining the public and personal in the national story.[27]
Indeed, this seemed to irk sections of the right-wing press, particularly Peter McKay in the Evening Standard who wrote of the final series, “Since this salt-caked series first put to sea in October 1971 we have had equal rights legislation, and this now seems to be reflected in the story lines, despite the fact that they are all set in the last century.”[28]
McKay added that Jessica Benton, who plays Elizabeth Fogarty/Onedin, “has become the small screen’s answer to Vanessa Redgrave” and that “men dutifully cringe before the women, who run things both on sea and on land.”[29] McKay also complained that the series was becoming “a whining wife on the ocean wave” with “trendy Women’s Lib lines.”[30] He especially lamented that Benton, who “at the start of the series would have been the dream hammock partner of many a mariner,” has “turned into a glaring egomaniacal monster who makes Captain Baines look like a nancy boy.”[31] An earlier interview with Ann Stallybrass (who played James’s assertive wife in the first two seasons) appeared to vindicate McKay’s concerns. An article, which appeared in the Sun, attempted to explain the early appeal of the series, concluding that “a ringside seat at the battle of the sexes” was a main consideration. It then quoted Stallybrass as saying, “I was discussing it with Jessica Benton, who plays Onedin’s sister . . . we’re both very anti-Women’s Lib. But in those days, women really needed protection. If a woman walked out on her husband society turned its back on her.”[32]
So if The Onedin Line did fall short of successfully “feminizing” British history, it did set out with clarity the terms of the imbalance. Such concerns further demonstrate the complicated form of national identity articulated in the series: that which challenged previous articulations of national identity surrounding the maritime sphere as hegemonic and almost unanimously masculine.
The Onedin Line remained popular until the final series and continued to be popular abroad, selling to over eighty-five countries.[33] It was most likely due to the weariness of lead Peter Gilmore with being typecast, along with the continually high cost of filming at sea, that eventually led to the series’ cancellation (the show was originally canceled after the third series when Gilmore initially declined further involvement).[34] Audiences flocked to exhibitions of the series’ costumes at Greenwich, and the fate of the main ships, the Charlotte Rhodes and the Christian Radditch,[35] involved in the filming was regularly reported long after the show’s cancellation,[36] suggesting the appeal of the age of sail to people in Britain. The Onedin Line therefore marks an important watershed for the projection of maritime and national identity on British television.[37] It tapped into British visual and maritime heritage and how the concept of an island nation and maritime landscapes created a form of collective identity in Britain. The sea is an important site for identity formation, but as The Onedin Line suggests, it is not uniform and fully prescribed. It is a site of danger and hard work as well as romance and adventure. Collective identity is framed not through conformity to secure military and institutional symbols of dominance but through hard labor and experience. The sea is projected very much as a masculine frontier but is complicated by the occasional transgression of gender boundaries and the vicissitudes of business and commerce, building a more complex notion of collective and national identity.
The show also set the tone for many future costume dramas on British television that engaged with maritime heritage. To the Ends of the Earth (2005) took the concept of the navy and the maritime as places of security and romance and inverted it still further, while Channel 4’s Longitude (1999) suggested that Britain’s dominance of the seas was as much the result of an obscure, uneducated watchmaker, toiling away in isolation to successfully solve the problem of nautical navigation, as it was of flagship naval victories. The BBC’s adaptations of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1995 and 2005) both highlighted the tensions between naval officers at sea (respected heroes) and in polite society (circumspect), while on ITV, Hornblower (1998–2003) was cast in the mold of swashbuckling adventure more in tune with the successful Sharpe series (1993–2008). Similarly, Downton Abbey’s (2010– ) opening episode dealt with the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic, one of Britain’s worst maritime disasters. The failure of ITV’s Making Waves (a contemporary naval drama first broadcast in 2004 but canceled after three episodes) suggested that there was little interest in the contemporary navy after the 1970s: the navy’s place was clearly in the past in the public imagination. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why this may have been, but Victoria Carolan suggests a number of factors such as the disarmament movements in Britain since the 1960s, the continuing dissolution of the British Empire, and the shift of emphasis in teaching Britain’s naval past in school history syllabuses, all contributing to the distancing and historicizing of the navy in the social sphere.[38] Crucially, Carolan points to the abolition of national service in 1960 as a catalyst for the estrangement of the larger British public with firsthand experience in the military, reducing the impact and relevance of naval stories. Here, another comparison can be made with the Hollywood Western, whose ubiquity in film until the 1960s first transferred to television (Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, etc.) and then whose central myths were subject to increasing revisionism as social changes instigated a questioning of traditional American history. As a founding myth of how modern Britain was built on warfare and aggressive commerce, depictions of the navy now fulfill a similar function, occasionally surfacing to interrogate history, or provide a romantic version of it. The Onedin Line clearly strove to perform both ritual functions.
Peter Graham Scott, British Television: An Insider’s History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 208.
Ibid.
Susan Rose, The Medieval Sea (London: Continuum, 2007), 3.
See, for example, Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997).
Jonathan Rayner, The Naval War Film: Genre, History and National Cinema (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Victoria Carolan, “British Maritime History, National Identity and Film, 1900–1960” (PhD diss., Queen Mary University, 2012).
Penny Summerfield, “Divisions at Sea: Class, Gender, Race and Nation in Maritime Films of the Second World War, 1939–60,” Twentieth Century British History 22, no. 3 (2011): 330–53.
Victoria Carolan, “British Maritime History,” 172.
See, for example, “‘Small Island’ Britain: Cameron Rejects Slight,” Sky News, 6 September 2013, accessed 8 September 2013, http://uk.news.yahoo.com/.
Ann Day and Ken Lunn, “British Maritime Heritage: Carried Along by the Currents?,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 9, no. 4 (June 2010): 295.
“Television Listings,” Times (London), 15 July 1976, 6.
Sarah Monks, “‘Suffer a Sea-Change’: Turner, Painting, Drowning,” Tate Papers (spring 2010): 3.
BBC press release, quoted in Sean Day Lewis, “Sea Saga More Like Sheltered Pool,” Daily Telegraph, 16 October 1971 (British Film Institute archives).
Scott, British Television, 215.
Ibid., 222.
Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979), preface, 3.
Christine Geraghty, The Fifties War Film: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” (London: Routledge, 2000), 176.
See, for example, Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
The Radio Times: Onedin Line Special (London: BBC, 1973), 83.
Shaun Usher, “Television Review,” Daily Mail, 18 September 1972 (British Film Institute archives).
Sylvia Clayton, “Television Review,” Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1971 (British Film Institute archives). The Tribune also concurred, suggesting, “The sea runs in our English veins, no doubt” (Audrey Williamson, “Television Review,” Tribune, 28 May 1976 [British Film Institute archives]).
Summerfield, “Divisions at Sea,” 332.
See, for example, Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994).
Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995).
The Radio Times, 83.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 5.
Ibid.
Peter McKay, “Very Wavy Navy,” Evening Standard, 25 July 1979, 18 (British Film Institute archives).
Ibid.
Peter McKay, “Meanwhile, Back on Our Own Ranch . . . ” Evening Standard, 2 August 1979 (British Film Institute archives).
Ibid.
Gail Curtis, “All Aboard for the Onedins,” Sun, 16 September 1972 (British Film Institute archives).
Scott, British Television, 231.
Shaun Usher, “Onedin Wants to Quit,” Daily Mail, 5 January 1974 (British Film Institute archives).
BBC Annual Report and Handbook 1983 (London: BBC, 1983), 78.
“Onedin Ship Sank Because Vital Repairs Not Done, Ex-Owner Claims,” Times (London), 5 November 1985, 4.
Carolan, “British Maritime History,” 294–97.
Ibid.
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Piece of Cake, Danger UXB, and the
Second World War
Monarchs were deposed in the aftermath of the First World War, empires carved into nations, and the map of Europe literally redrawn. The effects of those changes shadowed the two decades following the armistice: wars and rumors of wars, the rise of dictators and the tottering of democracies, economic catastrophe and the threat of unrest (if not outright revolution) among the working classes. The British—part of Europe, however much they might have wished otherwise—felt the effects of the tumult, but it was buffered by Britain’s geographic and cultural insularity. Beneath the glossy, modern surface of the 1920s and 1930s, echoes of the long nineteenth century lingered on in Britain. Only the return of total war, signaled by the renewal of German air attacks in the summer of 1940, snuffed it out for good.
Perhaps because of this quirk of history, British television costume dramas have embraced the interwar years. The plot arcs of Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975), The Duchess of Duke Street (1976–1977), and Downton Abbey (2010– ) carry their Edwardian-era characters through the Great War and seamlessly into the 1920s. The series Edward and Mrs. Simpson (1978) stretches from the mid-1920s to 1936, while Brideshead Revisited (1981) and To Serve Them All My Days (1980) span the twenties and thirties. All of them, to varying degrees, present the era as a kind of Indian summer, a last moment in the sun for the Edwardian-inflected lifestyles of the upper classes before the winter of the Second World War.[1] Their settings—London townhouses, country estates, and rural boarding schools—isolate them from the slow-rising tide of modernity that would, in wartime, become a flood.
Danger UXB (ITV, 1979) and Piece of Cake (ITV, 1988) are about the flood. They share the form of the interwar costume dramas—limited-run series with richly detailed historical backdrops, large ensemble casts, and intertwined, character-driven plot arcs—but not their outlook. Set during the early years of the Second World War, they cut against the grain of the genre and consistently subvert its conventions. Their characters are overwhelmingly male, they center on the public rather than the domestic sphere, and they place work squarely in the dramatic foreground. Their focus on work, however, heralds a more audacious subversion of the genre. The two series are, at their core, tales of men defined by their knowledge and skills rather than by their wealth and social position. Inattentive, incompetent, and inflexible characters routinely fall and frequently die; the survivors, in turn, learn to be more focused, more skillful, and more adaptable. Equally important, they learn to develop an all-consuming focus on The Work and to embrace the values of the industrial age: speed, practicality, and ruthless efficiency.
The serialized Second World War drama was, by the late 1970s, a familiar and established subgenre in British television. A half dozen such series, along with the popular wartime comedy Dad’s Army, aired in the decade before Danger UXB premiered; more, notably including the long-running Allo Allo (1982–1992), premiered in the decade that followed.[2] Both Danger UXB and Piece of Cake broke new ground, however, in their focus on combat operations and the historical precision of their settings. Rather than simply use the war as backdrop, they took place on the de facto front lines at particular, clearly identified moments within the war. They were, in this respect as well as in others, spiritual successors to Wings, a 1977–1978 BBC production about the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War.[3] Piece of Cake follows “Hornet Squadron” of the Royal Air Force (RAF), from the outbreak of war in September 1939 to the climax of the Battle of Britain—the German Luftwaffe’s campaign to neutralize the RAF in preparation for a possible German invasion of Britain—in September 1940.[4] The first nine episodes of Danger UXB (out of a total of thirteen) take place between September 1940 and December 1941, during the aerial “Blitz” on British cities that Germany hoped would push Britain toward a negotiated peace. The series are thus centered on the period when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, “holding the ring” until the Axis powers’ aggression brought the Soviet Union (June 1941) and United States (December 1941) into the war.
The Battle of Britain and the Blitz carry a heavy load of ideological freight in the popular memory of the war. They have come to represent (in Churchill’s phrase) the “finest hour” not just of the servicemen who saved Britain but also of the British nation as a whole.[5] The two series tap into that mythology while simultaneously challenging key aspects of it. Where the popular image of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz frames those saviors as the embodiment of prewar values, however, Piece of Cake and Danger UXB present them as symbols of a new cultural order. They depict the final disintegration of the world celebrated by more traditional costume dramas, but—far from lamenting its passing—they valorize the knowledge-driven, technocratic society that took its place.
Costume dramas traditionally concern themselves with affairs of the leisured classes and those who serve them, but Piece of Cake and Danger UXB are dramas of the workplace. Both sets of characters are rarely off the job, and even when they are, work is never far away. The pilots rest on lawn chairs in the sun, but they are dressed in their boots and flying jackets, their aircraft only a minute’s sprint away. The sappers take their tea breaks in mud-spattered coveralls,[6] gathered around a portable stove set up on a truck bed or an overturned crate. The handful of scenes in each series that take characters away from work are, even so, shadowed by it. Danger UXB uses the trope repeatedly, in settings both comic and tragic. Lieutenant Brian Ash, the central character, finds that his trysts with his married lover, Susan Mount, are complicated less by the actions of her husband than by urgent summons from headquarters. Corporal Jack Salt, one of his men, goes AWOL in the episode “Digging Out” in order to persuade his family to leave their frequently bombed hometown of Manchester for the safety of the countryside. Minutes after his arrival a German bomb hits the neighborhood, demolishing his house, killing his wife, and rendering his home indistinguishable from the rubble-strewn bomb sites in which he works.
The centrality of work shapes both series’ presentation of their characters. Within the ensemble casts, individuals are framed as heroes or villains, admirable or despicable, according to their ability to get the job done. Innocence, charm, wit, integrity, and social grace—the virtues that define the heroes of prewar costume dramas—count for little. Focus, intensity, adaptability, and ruthless efficiency—the virtues of industrial capitalism and the factory floor—are everything. Characters who would have been banished to the fringes of traditional costume dramas thus move to the center of wartime ones.
Pilots Chris Hart and “Fanny” Barton, the closest thing to conventional heroes in Piece of Cake, set themselves apart from their fellow pilots by treating war as a serious business: something to be studied, worked at, and practiced with clinical efficiency. Hart, a wealthy American who flew for the Loyalist air force in the Spanish Civil War, is the only pilot in the squadron with combat experience. Barton—haunted by his role in mistakenly shooting down a British aircraft—becomes his protégé. In episode 3, for example, the other pilots are exuberant over their first success against the enemy, but Hart remains unimpressed and coolly analytical. “It’s a Mickey Mouse kill,” he tells Barton as they examine the wreckage of the German bomber, “like rolling a drunk in the street.” The squadron enjoyed a six-to-one numerical advantage with no interference from enemy fighters, he notes, and still scored only a handful of hits on their target. Hart—who has quietly adjusted his guns so that their streams of bullets converge only 250 yards ahead of his aircraft, rather than the RAF-mandated 400—tells Barton that he closes with the enemy and holds his fire until he cannot miss. “You should do it to, too,” he says. “Next time it could be one-on-one instead of six-on-one.” An episode later, Hart instructs a mechanic—again in defiance of RAF practice—to install a steel plate behind the seat of his aircraft: rudimentary armor to protect him from shrapnel and bullet fragments in the event of an attack from the rear. The potential value of such protection is made manifest a few scenes later, when the squadron returns from a mission with one pilot’s right hand mangled by bullets and the commanding officer (CO), Squadron Leader Rex, bleeding from a score of shrapnel wounds in his back.
The vindication of Hart’s ideas about tactics takes more time and additional losses. Rex insists on using the RAF’s standard prewar formation: predetermined attack patterns, and three-plane V formations in which the second pilot watches the leader’s flanks and the third, “tail-end Charlie,” covers the other three.[7] As combat intensifies and losses mount, the squadron’s most experienced pilots—Hart, Barton, “Flash” Gordon, and “Moggy” Cattermole—grow increasingly dissatisfied with Rex’s inflexibility. “We spent a great deal of time regrouping,” Cattermole says in a postmission debriefing in episode 4, implying that the time and energy needed to fly tight formations would be better spent fighting the enemy. We go into battle in “a tidy, tight formation, flying wingtip to wingtip,” Hart says after a rookie pilot is shot down in episode 3, quoting Rex’s own words in a bitter, mocking tone. “It’s supposed to terrify the Nazis.” Barton, more measured and clinical, observes that the new man died because “tail-end Charlie looks out [for] the formation. We can’t look out for him.”
Change comes, eventually, by attrition rather than enlightenment. Rex’s poor grasp of tactics catches up with him, and in episode 4 he is killed in a suicidal attack on a far superior enemy force. Barton steps into the role of squadron leader, with Hart as his de facto second-in-command, and it is Hart’s tactics that he drills into the less-experienced pilots. Episode 5 opens with him reminding his pilots of what are, clearly, now standing orders: “Get in close, hammer the buggers hard, and then get out . . . don’t take chances.” The series frames the change in leadership as the triumph of the adaptable over the hidebound, and its architects as outsiders—Barton is an Australian rancher, Hart a wealthy American—who already possess the unsentimental, win-at-all-costs attitude the modern battlefield requires. Zabarnowski and Haducek, refugees from occupied Europe who join the squadron when it returns to Britain, possess similar ruthlessness, fueled by a single-minded desire to avenge their homelands. A staff officer refers to them as “real killers,” using the term approvingly and arguing that such men are precisely what Britain needs to survive.
The enlisted soldiers in Danger UXB are outsiders in a different sense: manual laborers in a society defined by its disdain for such labor and the working classes who perform it. To them falls the job of physically uncovering the bomb—shifting hundreds of pounds of earth, rock, and debris in the process—and creating a stable workspace around it. Once the fuse has been neutralized, they extract the bomb from the ground and load it into a waiting truck for removal. Their war is fought with spades, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows, an extension of their peacetime jobs as laborers, milkmen, and truck drivers. The bombsites depicted in the series are, overwhelmingly, in “ordinary” urban settings: working-class residential streets, factories, parish churches, and shops.[8] Their familiarity with, and comfort in, such settings is palpable, as is their discomfort when they are dispatched to the stately country home shared by Susan Mount and her scientist-father, Dr. David Gillespie.
Country house and paid domestic staff notwithstanding, however, Gillespie is no member of the ruling elite. References to his prewar work in the mining industry suggest that he earned, rather than inherited, his money, and his wartime work as an explosives expert advising the Ministry of Defence on bomb disposal suggests a background in engineering or applied science, and a doctorate from the University of Glasgow or the Royal College of Mines rather than Oxford or Cambridge. Ash, though “an officer and a gentleman” by courtesy because of the lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder boards, is likewise a man of no particular social distinction.[9] He drives an MG roadster, but insecurity over his family background, redbrick-university education, practical degree course (civil engineering), and makeshift officer’s training render him awkward and self-conscious around the more polished, socially connected members of the prewar officer class.[10]
Ash and Gillespie, the men of 347 Section, and the pilots of Hornet Squadron are defined by their work, and their work is defined by machines. Their lives depend on their knowledge of the material world and their mastery of the tools used to manipulate it, and those qualities define the stories. The two series are tales of heroic actions but also of accumulating expertise. They take place in worlds where knowledge is strength and the fate of the nation rests in the hands of people who make it their business to know things.
The equation of knowledge and strength is particularly prominent and straightforward in Danger UXB, which takes place in a world where that which does not kill the heroes makes them smarter. Brian Ash enters the story fresh from training: a tabula rasa who knows little of military protocol and nothing of bomb disposal. He is, however, a compulsive seeker after knowledge, willing to talk to anyone who will supply information he lacks. The first episode, “Dead Man’s Shoes,” opens with a string of such moments: Ash in his car, asking a pair of schoolboys for directions; Ash at what he believes is his new unit’s headquarters, asking for confirmation from the corporal of the guard; and Ash in a briefing room, receiving a crash course in German bombs from more experienced officers. On his first field assignment, he begins, once again, in complete ignorance. His unflappable Scottish second-in-command, Sergeant James, schools him on which tools to use and remains at his side, quietly offering advice, as he makes his first approach to the bomb. Ash orders the obviously reluctant James to safety only when he is ready to extract the bomb’s fuse, an act that military protocol, and his own sense of honor, require him to perform alone.
In waving Sergeant James off, Ash implicitly declares that he is knowledgeable enough to attempt defusing his first bomb. His success (and thus survival) confirms that belief. The first stage of his education ends when he emerges alive from the pit, but the larger process of his education continues. Each subsequent episode introduces new information that Ash must master if he is to survive: larger bombs, booby-trapped fuses, and new tools for neutralizing them. He and his fellow officers are shown constantly learning: formally from manuals and technical briefings as well as informally from conversations with each other. The enlisted men enter the story already knowledgeable, but they, too, steadily expand their expertise, applying their knowledge of basic physics (ramps, pulleys, levers, and pendulums) to new challenges. Episode 7, “Digging Out,” has Ash confronting a new type of bomb while—elsewhere in the same bombed-out factory—Jack Salt and three fellow sappers use an improvised derrick to shift a second bomb and free a young woman trapped in the wreckage beneath.
Piece of Cake draws a similar link between strength and knowledge. Hart’s combat experience in Spain makes him, early in the series, the most formidable pilot in the squadron. What the others are in the process of learning—and must learn, if they are to survive—he already knows. Later in the series, Barton, Cattermole, and Gordon—by then veterans themselves—follow his lead in criticizing Rex’s prewar tactics, arguing for the primacy of hard-won experience over abstract doctrine. On the ground, intelligence officer “Skull” Skelton uses gun-camera footage, and the probing questions he asks during after-action debriefings to separate the actual numbers of enemy aircraft destroyed and damaged from the (invariably higher) numbers reported by the pilots. Good faith and earnest belief are not enough, he argues in response to the irritation—or outright hostility—this engenders. War is serious business, and it is essential to know.
Both series’ most powerful equation of knowledge with national strength takes place, ironically, at the margins of the story. The pilots in Piece of Cake are far more effective in defense of Britain than they were in defense of France because they know where, when, and in what strength the enemy is attacking. They thus go into battle forewarned and forearmed, with no need to waste time, fuel, attention, or other scarce resources seeking out their targets. Ash and the other bomb-disposal officers in Danger UXB receive a steady flow of information about German bombs, their fuses, and how best to disable them.
The source of these streams of information—left (almost) entirely offscreen—is a vast network of individuals intimately engaged with a complex system of machines. The pilots of Hornet Squadron are guided to their targets by the RAF’s centralized fighter-control network, which draws its information on incoming enemy aircraft from a chain of coastal radar stations.[11] Susan Gillespie assists her scientist-father in developing better tools for disarming German bombs, but they are part of a network of thousands of scientists and technicians working in laboratories all over Britain to further the war effort. Susan’s husband is kept away from her (enabling her affair with Ash) by his own work in cryptanalysis, making him another part of the military-industrial-university complex that will shape the postwar era. Neither series spends much time explaining these realities—assuming, perhaps, that viewers will easily recognize the beginnings of the world in which they live.
The collision between the emerging postwar world and the dying prewar one is, in both series, a source of tension and conflict second only to the war itself. The gulf of incomprehension that separates junior officers from senior ones aligns, precisely and consistently, with the fault line dividing the two worlds. Similarly, in Piece of Cake, the cultural chasm divides the English pilots from those born in the provinces, or abroad. The defense of Britain in 1940–1941 was led, both series suggest, by men who—on the whole—had little connection with, and often less regard for, the prewar order of things.
Danger UXB’s embodiments of the prewar world—the three senior officers of the 97th—are acutely aware of and (more often than not) befuddled by its passing. Lieutenant Leckie, the adjutant, whose beefy frame and luxuriant mustache evoke the 1910s, is an amiable but ineffectual time-server constantly recalling how things were done “in the last war.” Major Luckhurst, the CO who welcomes Ash to the unit, is more conscientious as well as more imaginative. All too aware of how ill prepared he is to lead a bomb disposal unit, he muddles through knowing that his time has passed. Captain Francis, initially the executive officer, actively tries to hold back the passing of the old order. When he becomes CO, he incites a near mutiny among the younger officers by demanding that they adopt the time-consuming spit-and-polish and elaborate social rituals of peacetime rather than the scruffy, informal efficiency of wartime.
The senior officers in Piece of Cake are, if anything, even more out of touch with the realities of modern warfare and even more determined to preserve the gentility of the prewar world. Rex, the CO, orders fine food and wine from Harrods for the officers’ mess and pays for it out of his own (evidently vast) personal fortune. When the squadron is posted to France, he requisitions a country estate to serve as their barracks and has his personal automobile shipped (and pet dog flown) across the channel to join them. Skelton, the intelligence officer, aptly describes his leadership style as “almost feudal”: he dispenses largesse in the form of food, wine, and plush accommodations but demands absolute personal loyalty from the pilots in return. The pilots—with the notable exceptions of Hart and, to a lesser extent, Barton—follow his example, acting like sons of landed gentry or upperclassmen at an elite boarding school. They toboggan down staircases on tea trays, play rugby with a chamber pot in the library, and enjoy lavish meals in what Rex’s superior officer, Air Commodore Bletchley, calls “the only decent officer’s mess” in the area.
Rex’s behavior is part of a broader attempt, abetted by squadron adjutant and First World War veteran “Uncle” Kellaway, to carry prewar cultural norms into wartime. The CO openly plies Bletchley with food and wine, and directs the collection of “trophies” (bits of wreckage) from the downed bomber as if the base were a hunt club. Kellaway cautions Hart against lecturing others on lessons learned in Spain on the grounds that too much “shop talk” is bad for morale, and Rex dismisses the conflict there as “not a real war.” Later, the adjutant reproves Skelton for his enthusiastic embrace of gun cameras. His determination to know “what really happened” in battle is, Kellaway insists, an affront to the pilots, who—as officers and gentlemen—should be taken at their word when they report the number of enemy aircraft they destroyed and damaged. Bletchley, too, seems determined to deny the reality of war. Summing up the geopolitical situation as the Nazis overrun France, he uses an elaborate football metaphor, expressing satisfaction that Britain now has “home-ground advantage” for the “final” with Germany. All three—like the senior officers in Danger UXB—belong to a world that, they sense, is crumbling around them, never to be rebuilt.
The younger men, too, recognize that the Edwardian-tinged prewar order is crumbling, and something else—its shape not yet apparent—is rising in its place. The enlisted men’s comments on arriving at Gillespie’s country house in the episode “Cast Iron Killer” hint at the forces that brought the Labour Party to power in the last months of the war. One observes that “it’s one war for this lot and another one for us, in’t it?” and another that their own lot didn’t seem bad until they experienced privilege. Lieutenant Skelton, in the same speech where he describes Rex’s leadership as “feudal,” muses that Barton’s is “almost democratic.” Moggy Cattermole, meanwhile, becomes one of the squadron’s most effective pilots by casting aside the once-stringent “rules” of war and embracing his inner sociopath. He shoots down unarmed German rescue planes over the channel, machine guns downed enemy pilots in their rafts, and berates a newer pilot for his squeamishness about doing the same. Bletchley quietly commends him for his initiative but orders him never to mention it. “The public,” he says, “would never understand.”
Cattermole’s ruthless cost-benefit analysis extends, as well, to his own countrymen. Early in episode 6, he bails out of his Spitfire after it suffers a catastrophic engine failure, and (without a pilot’s hand on the controls) it crashes into a row of houses and kills four civilians, including an infant. Criticized by Skelton for not staying with the aircraft longer, he retorts, “I don’t have an ounce of gallantry, and I don’t intend to get myself killed to save three and a half [civilians] . . . it’s their war as well, you know. They’re always saying this is a ‘people’s war.’ Well, now they know what it’s like.”[12] Skelton, appalled, acidly reminds him that “they used to say women and children first,” but the pilot is unmoved. “Did they,” he says. “But they can’t fly Spitfires, can they?” Moggy is portrayed, throughout the series, as a callous, self-centered bully. He is also, however, the character who most consistently speaks the absolutely unvarnished truth, leaving viewers to wonder if he might have a point.
The series’ ambiguity toward Moggy’s ruthlessness is prefigured by an earlier scene, from the end of episode 4. As France crumbles and Hornet Squadron prepares to evacuate, Squadron Leader Rex’s dog stands outside the chateau, still awaiting the return of his dead master. Barton—a rancher’s son turned pragmatic war leader and the series’ most consistently sympathetic character—considers the animal for a moment and then draws his service revolver and shoots it. There is no room for dogs on the transport aircraft and no room for Edwardian sentimentality in modern war.
Britain emerged from the war determined to defend its dominant position in global affairs and with good reason to expect success. It still possessed a global empire, was less damaged by the war than any major power save the United States, and had developed many of the technologies that would define geopolitical power in the postwar world: the early warning radar network, the jet engine, and the digital computer among them. Britain pursued that dream through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, committing itself to developing homegrown versions of the high-status technologies of the era. Postwar “boffin films” like The Sound Barrier (1947) and The Dambusters (1954), along with novels like Nevil Shute’s No Highway (1948) and Arthur C. Clarke’s Prelude to Space (1951), celebrated the dream in fictional form, imagining a world in which Britons, having helped the war with their technological ingenuity, went on to define the postwar world and ensure Britain’s continued preeminence in it.[13]
Reality proved, in the end, to be more complicated. Shorn of its empire, and reduced to junior-partner status in Cold War diplomacy, Britain lost most of its geopolitical influence and with it most of its justification for resource-intensive enterprises such as supersonic aviation, space travel, and a homegrown nuclear deterrent force. Economically and technologically, too, Britain emerged into the shadow of the United States. Its global influence, and reputation for cutting-edge innovation, increasingly rested—as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s—on culture: sports, fashion, and the arts. That shift rendered the cultural gulf between prewar and postwar Britain even more pronounced. The “boffins” of the 1940s and 1950s (real and fictional) had come from outside the traditional elites but made common cause with them. The leading cultural figures of the 1960s—the ones who made Britain’s influence felt beyond the British Isles—were likewise “outsiders” but ones who defined themselves and their work in opposition to the cultural institutions of the recent (that is, prewar) past.[14]
Piece of Cake and Danger UXB, which depict the first stirrings of those changes, were products of the Thatcher era, when the changes came to full fruition.[15] Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter and university-trained scientist whose political base lay outside the traditional public-school and Oxbridge elite, and both series reflect her political style: hard edged, ruthlessly practical, and intolerant of tradition for its own sake. Their heroes, though themselves apolitical, are presented as heroic because they embody distinctly Thatcherite virtues. Fanny Barton, Flash Gordon, Brian Ash, and Jack Salt come from the social margins of the Anglophone world: from the sheep station, the building site, the mines, and the redbrick university. They are practical men, masters of machines and products of a world shaped by them, whose lives are shaped by work rather than leisure and who value efficacy over tradition. They are—as the “Iron Lady” saw herself—heroic because they are uncompromising in pursuit of their goals, willing to defy convention and trample the sensitive feelings of others when the survival of the nation is at stake. They are the architects (though perhaps unwittingly so) of the world that postwar Britain will become: the world of Orwell and Pinter, Jagger and Daltrey, Margaret Thatcher, and Manchester United. If the characters in traditional prewar costume dramas embody Britain’s self-assured past, then their wartime equivalents—Hornet Squadron and 347 Section—stand for its uncertain future.
For the flavor of the period, see Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End (1940; repr., New York: Norton, 2011).
These series typically focused on small “home-front” communities (Dad’s Army, Enemy at the Door, Private Schulz, and Allo Allo) or members of the Allied forces behind enemy lines as prisoners (Colditz), evaders (Manhunt, Secret Army), or covert agents (Wish Me Luck). Pathfinders, a 1972–1973 series about a Royal Air Force unit assigned to mark targets for night bombing raids, was unusual for the period and the genre in that it dealt with combat operations.
Much of Wings takes place during the era of the “Fokker Scourge” (roughly July 1915 to January 1916) when Allied—particularly British—aircraft were markedly less sophisticated, and thus more vulnerable, than the German fighters they faced in combat. Its focus on issues of class and technical expertise (the hero, son of a provincial blacksmith and amateur aviator, is commissioned an officer because his technical experience trumps his low social standing) prefigures that in the series discussed in this chapter.
The scholarly and popular literature on the Battle of Britain is vast, but Richard Overy, The Battle of Britain (New York: Norton, 2011), and Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds., The Burning Blue (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), provide a useful introduction.
On the popular memory of 1940–1941, see Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940 (London: Routledge, 2000); S. P. MacKenzie, The Battle of Britain on Screen (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); and Garry Campion, The Good Fight (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
In the Royal Engineers, “sapper” is the rank equivalent to “private” in other branches. The name derives from “sapping”—undermining enemy fortifications by tunneling—which was once a principal mission of combat engineers.
Overy, Battle of Britain, 73.
The celebration of “ordinary” (that is, working-class) Britons began during the war itself. See Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986), 218–45.
Ironically, Ash is played by Anthony Andrews, who two years later would play the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.
On the persistence of class snobbery in the British armed forces during this era, see Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (London: Sphere, 1990).
Overy, Battle of Britain, 43–47.
“People’s War” was a propaganda term intended to allay Soviet and American suspicions that Britain was, primarily, fighting to preserve its empire. On the sociopolitical realities of the “People’s War” in 1940–1941, see Calder, Myth of the Blitz; and Richard North, The Many, Not the Few (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
On the origin of “boffin” (roughly, “eccentric technical wizard”) and the postwar “boffin films,” see Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 171–95.
Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2005).
Margaret Thatcher served as leader of the Conservative Party in opposition from 1975 to 1979 and as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Danger UXB appeared in the year of her first general election victory (1979), the novel Piece of Cake in the year of her second (1983), and the television adaptation of Piece of Cake in 1988, two years before her general election defeat.
Giselle Bastin
The 2010–2012 BBC production of Upstairs, Downstairs[1] marks a fascinating departure from its original 1970s series[2] for the ways it engages in contemporary debates about historiography about Britain in the interwar period. The new series, despite filling its episodes with stock appearances by important historical figures and famous events from the period, avoids some of the more simplistic representations of 1930s Britain by situating one of its main protagonists, Sir Hallam Holland, as a compromised character within the various discourses that feed into the overarching theme of domestic and foreign appeasement. By making the master of the house an equivocator in his domestic affairs in ways that mirror the Chamberlain government’s confused dealings with the German leadership throughout the late 1930s, the new Upstairs, Downstairs gives a partial nod to many postwar debates about appeasement while resisting the tendency of many other popular representations of the period that paint England’s relationship with prewar Germany in a simplistic light.
Conceived by two well-known English actresses, Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins (both of whom appear in the 2010 remake), both the 1971–1975 and 2010–2012 series trace the interconnecting lives of the above- and below-stairs characters across a selection of historical moments in the early twentieth century. In the original series, the head of the house is Sir Richard Bellamy, a Tory peer, who is married to Lady Marjorie, an earl’s daughter. Sir Richard and Lady Bellamy have two children, James and Elizabeth, and a below-stairs “family” of servants consisting of Hudson the butler, Mrs. Bridges the cook, parlormaid Rose Buck (who returns in the 2010 series), Alfred the footman, Ruby the kitchen maid, and Sarah the feisty under-house parlormaid who, despite dreaming of better things, nonetheless becomes entangled with the chauffeur, Thomas. In the new series, Eaton Place is reopened for business under the ownership of one of Britain’s “sons of empire,” Sir Hallam Holland and his wife, Lady Agnes, a daughter of an impoverished earl from an ancient family. Hallam and Agnes preside over an upstairs world that consists of Lady Agnes’s sister, Lady Persie Towyn; Lady Maud Holland (Hallam’s mother); and Dr. Blanche Mottershead, who is Lady Maud’s half-sister. Downstairs is run by Mr. Warwick Pritchard, the butler; Mrs. Thackeray the cook; Mr. Amanjit Singh, Lady Maud’s personal servant; Johnny the footman; Eunice the parlormaid; Mrs. Buck the housekeeper; and Beryl, the feisty nursery-cum-lady’s maid who by series’ end marries the chauffeur, Spargo.
According to Carl Freedman, the original series depicts an England that “never quite existed” but that corresponded “to what an England in the early seventies dearly wished itself to have been.”[3] Further, aired on America’s high-brow Masterpiece Theatre, the original series acted as “a sort of finishing school conducted by the former chief imperial power for the current one.”[4] America like Britain was undergoing a period of economic hardship, and this produced a ready-made audience for Upstairs, Downstairs, one in need of escape from contemporary realities such as Watergate and Vietnam. Moreover, the program’s depiction of the decay of the Edwardian system of social order, best summed up by the suicide near the end of the original series of the Bellamy’s wayward son after he gambles away the Bellamy “empire” on the stock market, gratified the American audience’s feelings of “invidia” that the former colony felt for its “Mother country.”[5] James Bellamy, as Freedman summarizes, is accused by his father, Sir Richard, of having “enjoyed virtually every advantage for which a young man might wish—independent wealth, intelligence, social prominence, good looks . . . and yet . . . has made a record of unbroken failure at every serious endeavor to which he has set his hand.”[6] This sense of a class in decline and beset by a deficit of moral and social leadership is taken up with renewed vigor in the contemporary series.
Like the original series, where British history is “refracted through the Bellamy household,”[7] the new series has been accused of assuaging the audience’s uncertainties about the present and producing “a text not unduly disturbing to middle-class sensibilities.”[8] According to Jenny Diski, the contemporary BBC production of Upstairs, Downstairs, like its rival on ITV, Downton Abbey, distracts from the present while also eliding aspects of the past. The “past,” she suggests, is reduced to a set of easily identifiable signifiers, ones that a modern audience can recognize easily and engage with on a superficial level; both Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs are characterized by taking “a familiar time, drawing a horizontal line along an axis, and marking it out with peak events everyone has heard of, weighting them with their most commonplace interpretations. This is then used as a moving backdrop in front of which the cast stand still and mime their progress while reiterating received opinions.”[9]
What Freedman identifies as the “elegiac tone” of the original is replaced in the new series by an awareness that the social and ideological structures embedded within the narrative structure of the 1970s 165 Eaton Place are no longer viable. This is because the thirty-year intermission between the old and new series has been marked by some important changes in the growth of the popular heritage market generally, particularly in the ways that contemporary audiences expect their “history” to be presented. The contemporary series sets out to inform audiences about a “past” that audiences would now recognize as being refracted through a contemporary vision of how the “past” has been shaped by earlier narratives about the period under review. In the intervening years since the 1970s, audiences have been fed a steady diet of narratives about Britain’s history through both fictional and nonfictional accounts, as well as from a history industry that has trained audiences to interpret the past through multiple historiographic lenses.
The new series of Upstairs, Downstairs opens in the year 1936, with the arrival of Sir Hallam and Lady Agnes to a dingy and dustcloth-covered 165 Eaton Place. The promise of new beginnings after the departure of the Bellamys marks the tone of the early scenes of series 1. Hallam’s mother, Lady Maud, has come to the house, bearing the remnants of empire in the shape of her pet monkey, Solomon, and her manservant, Mr. Amanjit Singh. Where Lady Maud sets about cataloging her bric-a-brac from her time in India, and reciting her memoirs about her time as the wife of a colonial ruler, her daughter-in-law Lady Agnes sets about redecorating Eaton Place and overseeing the employment of the band of servants who will run the house. Early scenes such as one where a cast-iron bath crashes over the balcony into the foyer below, one in which Lady Agnes has a very near miss, serve as prescient reminders that all the papering over of the walls of Eaton Place cannot cover the fractures that are starting to appear in the delicate fabric of 1930s British society. Good servants are hard to come by—a realization that dawns slowly on Lady Agnes and is exemplified in the first episode by the parlormaid Ivy’s painted nails that she keeps hidden beneath her gloves. The flash of red on Ivy’s fingertips sends an early warning signal that the 1930s servant class is on the brink of rebellion, a rebellion that will be hastened by the onset of war.
Lady Agnes’s domestic “setting in order” of Eaton Place is counterpointed by a subplot involving the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII, who, in his desire to renounce the throne to pursue his own interests and be with the woman he loves, sets the tone for all the incidents of the abrogation of duty that are about to beset this small corner of the fallen empire. Hallam and Agnes’s existence at the heart of London society is established early with their trying to do their bit by rallying behind their friends the Duke of Kent and Anthony Eden, who want a media cover-up of details of the king’s affair with the divorcee, Mrs. Simpson. Their efforts coincide with Mrs. Simpson’s introduction of the figure of Herr Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to London, into their home that, like the plummeting bath scene in episode 1, presages the tragedy that will beset the household in the coming years. Anthony Eden’s command that Hallam “get his house in order” and eradicate the poison at its core establishes early that Eaton Place serves to represent the site of domestic upheaval that is about to have its full expression in Britain’s compromised position on the international stage.
After setting the scene with the abdication of Edward VIII, the new series uses as its organizational framework the time line and coordinates of Britain’s descent into war with Germany throughout 1936 and 1939. The mapping of the fate of the Holland household according to key turning points in Britain’s road to war signals the new series’ intention to merge personal and public histories of Britain’s prewar period. Where the original 1970s series used historical events of the day such as the suffragette movement and the First World War as backdrops to the lives of the characters, the new series embeds events in interwar social history within, not only the content of the story line, but also the structuring of the narrative itself. “History” here moves away from being a backdrop to the story and becomes instead a structuring principle of the main plot. This is most clearly expressed in the structuring of Hallam’s and Persie’s affair according to Britain’s flirtation with, and seduction by, the Nazi regime in what becomes a convergence of public and personal history.
After the abdication of 1936, Upstairs, Downstairs moves on to cover the 1938 Anschluss, which saw Germany’s annexation of Austria, an annexation that coincides with Lady Persie’s arrival at Eaton Place and her eventual move to Munich where she can be nearer her German lover, Friedrich. While in Munich in 1938 to oversee the signing of the Munich agreement with Prime Minister Chamberlain, Hallam has his first intimate encounter with his sister-in-law, an event that prefigures his concerted effort to get Persie out of Germany following the horrors of “Crystal Night.” The second episode of the second series, titled “The Love that Pays the Price,” offers a portent of what awaits Persie, Hallam, Eaton Place, and Britain by series’ end. Persie’s and Hallam’s affair begins in earnest during the same period that Germany enters the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia, also in 1938, and by series’ end Lady Agnes and the below-stairs staff will have discovered Lady Persie’s “treachery”—both “domestic” in terms of her affair with her brother-in-law and “foreign” in terms of her dealings (both sexual and political) with representatives of the German government. Persie, whose name closely resembles “perfidy,” becomes the ultimate symbol of domestic and foreign betrayal in the story line as a whole. When confronted by Agnes, who demands to know when Hallam’s and her treachery began, Persie shoots back, “Munich, if you must know!” After Britain declares war with Germany, Persie, under threat of state arrest under the Emergency Powers Clause 18B, topples over the bannister and meets her demise in the well-tiled foyer of Eaton Place. From her appearance in series 1 as the disaffected and rootless daughter of an ancient and declining aristocratic family, Persie becomes the symbol of the collusion of her class and her government on the road to war with Germany. Her early flirtation with the figure of German foreign minister Herr Ribbentrop is juxtaposed with her relationship below stairs with the chauffeur, Spargo, who for a time shares her fascination with Oswald Mosley’s fascistic Blackshirts. As historian David Cannadine has noted about the proliferation of figures like Lady Persie in this period,
During the interwar years, many disappointed and déclassé aristocrats held opinions that were remarkably similar to Mosley’s: they regretted and resented the decline of their class; they hated capitalists, especially Jews; they despised democracy and parliamentary government; they were attracted by the authoritarian regimes on the continent; and they wanted peace with Hitler. Viewed against this broader historical background, Mosley may usefully be seen as the supreme example in his generation of patrician resentment, aristocratic paranoia, and upper-class marginality.[10]
Yet, although she forms the repository of much of the guilt and treachery that informs the main story line of the new series, Persie is not alone in being implicated in the narratives of domestic and foreign appeasement throughout the two series. She is unwittingly, though enthusiastically, aided in her downfall by Hallam, who despite his frequent expostulations about the evils of appeasement in his public life, is soon identified to be as much an equivocator in his domestic affairs as are Chamberlain and his Whitehall cronies in European diplomacy. It is Hallam who covers for his sister-in-law when Persie aborts Friedrich’s baby. Persie’s squalid backroom abortion (albeit one brought to realization in the comfortable surrounds of the Whitehall hotel of choice, the Dorchester) and Hallam’s aiding of the tragic and risky procedure reflect the squalid backroom attempts by those in power in Whitehall to make a deal with Germany, thereby aborting their duty to England and its people. Hallam’s sense of duty to his country is tested at one stage by the Duke of Kent, who asks him to act as courier for a letter that his brother, King George VI, has written personally to Hitler: Kent says, “You believe in England, don’t you?” And Hallam answers, “Always.” Yet he stands as a bulwark against appeasement in foreign policy, a policy, as the duke’s request suggests, that reaches the highest forms of government. That Hallam is blind to how his own behaviors compromise the future of his home forms the tragedy at the heart of this story.
Hallam’s opposition to appeasement, alongside the subplot that sees him “caught napping” with Persie—in much the same way that Hitler is quoted in the program as suggesting that Chamberlain’s Britain has been “caught napping”—suggests a willingness on behalf of Upstairs, Downstairs’ producers and writers to engage with some of the complexities of the debate about prewar appeasement.[11] Hallam expresses early and repeatedly his disagreement with what he sees as the folly of Britain’s negotiations with Germany. Despite being warned off his antiappeasement views by his boss, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax in episode 1 of the second series, he stands firm and tells his friend the Duke of Kent, “We are facing an all-out ideological war. . . . I cannot sanction ‘peace at any price’ . . . [we will] have to pay in blood.”
It is Hallam who offers an early voice of warning to Persie during her time as a Blackshirt, telling her, “Persie, you have embraced an ideology that you do not understand,” and it is Hallam who exhorts Agnes to give up dreams of moving to America just as England is “being pushed to the edge of the abyss!” In a characteristic gesture prominent in many contemporary explorations about Britain’s lead-up to the Second World War, Hallam proves to be a warning voice about what the rise of the Nazi regime will mean for Germany’s Jewish population and other marginalized groups. For example, it is he who brings his Down syndrome sister, Pamela, to live at Eaton Place, and despite some resistance on his part, he also allows his homosexual aunt to continue living in the house (although he continues to refer to her in the parlance of the time as an “invert”); most importantly, he takes responsibility for the well-being of the young Jewish girl, Lotte, after her mother, Rachel Perimutter, dies from an asthma attack brought on by her shock at witnessing fascist violence in London. All of these characters prefigure those who will be the most vulnerable victims of the oncoming Nazi terror. That they are the people who are already scorned, hidden, and marginalized by their British countrymen and countrywomen contributes to the program’s central motif that the problems that Britain faces in the coming war are ones that are already in evidence at home. To Persie’s nonchalant refusal to return from Germany and her teasing of Hallam that he is the only person she knows “who seems to think the world is going up in flames; everyone else has been all smiles since Munich,” Hallam replies presciently, “I think the Jewish population might disagree with that.”
Hallam’s stance on the threat facing Germany’s Jewish population, one that sees him sense—unlike most of his countrymen—the dangers that are to come, at first reflects a propensity in popular representations of the period to elide or suppress moments in public history that do not suit public discourses about Britain’s prewar history. For example, films such as Stephen Poliakoff’s Glorious 39 (2009)[12] and Richard Loncraine’s Gathering Storm (2002),[13] based on Winston Churchill’s war journals, present either two-dimensional, corrupt aristocratic arch-appeasers (Poliakoff) or otherwise clear-visioned, aristocratic arch-antiappeasers (Loncraine). Neither The Gathering Storm’s nor Glorious 39’s protagonists display the slightest degree of equivocation about their stance about Germany, be it supportive or condemnatory; interwar political history, as these films tell it, is, to quote literary theorist Michael André Bernstein, “inevitable simply because it happened.”[14] Yet, it is in Hallam’s opposition to what we would now recognize as “an already established future,”[15] along with his complicity in treachery at home, that distinguishes this program from films such as Glorious 39 and The Gathering Storm that seek to elide the degree to which debates about appeasement, both before the war and since, have been tinged by shades of gray. Knowing as we do the horrific outcomes of the Second World War and the Nazi atrocities, historiographical accounts of the period are more often than not filtered through a lens that implicates the appeasers of Nazi Germany in the atrocities themselves. Yet, as noted historian William R. Rock says of this period, appeasement was imbricated in Britain’s domestic as well as foreign policies:
Appeasement was as much a stepchild of British domestic politics . . . as a reaction to the Nazi regime. No students of interwar history can fail to be impressed by the troublesome internal divisions of English society, the degree to which unsolved economic and social problems absorbed the nation’s attention and energy, and the uncertain vacillations in political life and attitudes that resulted therefrom.[16]
Hallam is a comparatively rare creature, therefore, in the pantheon of programs about this period. In series 2, episode 5, he can walk away from his affair with Persie with the words, “I’m walking away from a lethal situation,” but the viewer knows, even if he does not, that it is already too late for Eaton Place. The figure of Lord Halifax is able to say to Hallam, when he finally realizes the Nazis’ true intentions, that “it is all very easy to see where it will end,” but the fact that Hallam has been able to see all along where the Nazi threat “will end” while being blind to what his domestic maneuverings will mean for his household and his marriage suggests an awareness at narrative level of the vagaries of historical foreshadowing and backshadowing.
Just as in other fictional representations of this period, the new Upstairs, Downstairs depicts a convenient repository of fascistic sympathies in the guise of the character of Persie. Her role as a Mitford-esque young aristocrat (“To other people I’ll always be the brainless younger sister who fell in love with the Nazis”) is to reflect her and her class’s sense of disaffection with its declining status in British society, while allowing also for the creation of distance between her and other fair-minded English countrymen and countrywomen who did not share her views. The idea that her “foreign” treachery is mirrored in her activities at home where her allure has embroiled Spargo as well as Hallam suggests nonetheless that her toxic ideological views have permeated both upstairs and downstairs; Persie, in other words, does not represent an evil “other” but offers a snapshot of British ideological sympathies of the time. Having acted as a traitor to her family and her country, it is perhaps inevitable that she must die, metaphorically plunging to her death from the heights above. Tellingly, it is left to Eunice, the lowly parlormaid, to clean up after Persie in what becomes a literal as well as figurative mopping up by the servant class after the squalid escapades of the people upstairs.
For the downstairs staff, life is shaped by its waking up after a long sleep after the frenetic party that is post-Edwardian England. After the Servants’ Ball near the end of series 2, one described as the servants’ “last hurrah,” nearly everyone wakes up with a hangover on what turns out to be the eve of war. The servants Johnny the footman and Spargo the chauffeur have, for the edification and entertainment of their masters, been representing Eaton Place in the boxing ring, figuratively enacting the fighting they will be doing for real in the near future on the fields of war. Mr. Amanjit, despite being referred to by a Whitehall mandarin as a mere “colonial,” continues as the most trusted and reliable defender of Eaton Place’s future. The internal fractures evident in the below-stairs culture (Pritchard’s pacifism, for example) are nonetheless counterbalanced by the servants’ quiet embracing of the future: Mrs. Thackeray forges on with her desire to serve interesting new food from the “new world” at the Joseph Kennedy dinner party in series 2, regardless of her plans being scuppered by Pritchard and Agnes who insist on traditional fare; Beryl and Spargo, too, embrace the promise of a new life in America, despite their plans being thwarted by Persie’s accidental wounding of Beryl on the eve of war. With Lady Agnes’s permission, Beryl and Spargo hold their wedding reception in the formal drawing room, which necessitates Hallam having to answer his own front door to the Duke of Kent who, upon being assured by Hallam that the circumstances are exceptional and that “the normal scheme of things will resume this evening,” replies, “There is now no normal scheme of things. For as long as this war lasts, we are all each other’s servants.” Throughout Upstairs, Downstairs, the servants have observed the upstairs events from the sidelines and crouched listening in doorways; it is they who have understood the meaning of the perfidious lipstick on Hallam’s shirt collar; and it is they who will make their voices heard in the future 1945 election when, as a people newly empowered by their saving of Britain’s shores during the country’s “finest hour,” will oust Conservative prime minister Churchill from office and usher in a Labour government.
Although facing Hitler’s bombs, Eaton Place is already a house in ruin, one where the sandbags gathered at the house’s entrance are as indicative of the threats from within as from without. By the series’ end the fractures in foreign and domestic policy, as they are represented in the twin settings of Whitehall and Belgravia, mean that the days of Britain’s old social order and world dominance are over. Life closes at the end of the 2012 series with Mr. Pritchard ushering Lady Agnes and Dr. Mottershead downstairs, via the outside servants’ entrance, to the designated air raid shelter; this closing scene offers a striking visual contrast with the opening scenes of series 1 when Lady Agnes enters her house by the front stairs at the same time as new nursery maid, Beryl, makes her descent down the servants’ stairs. In contrast to the clearly delineated worlds represented in the program’s early scenes, there is a quiet acceptance in the end that the old world order has altered irrevocably. Where in the original 1970s program Lady Marjorie Bellamy met her demise when she went down with the Titanic, the new series depicts an empire also found to be sinking; and despite Spargo’s and Beryl’s aborted attempts to board the boat for a new life in America, there is a degree of acceptance that they will have to stay put and help bail out their country. Hallam ends his glory days as an up-and-coming Whitehall civil servant by being demoted, in relative financial and political terms, to the role of equerry to the Duke of Kent. Like the empire itself, Hallam’s access to real power will become largely ceremonial as a result of this; it will also be short lived, given the actual Duke of Kent’s death in 1942. Lady Persie, the brittle, impoverished aristocrat, has ended her days colluding with the Germans and seducing her brother-in-law—a twin act of treachery that suggests Persie’s foreign dalliances merely mask a dissatisfied, rootless, fidgety, corrupt life at home. Persie’s last act of accidentally shooting Beryl is telling in that her act of folly very nearly takes the life of one of the members of the lower orders. It is Lady Agnes who gasps in the final episode, “I can’t breathe!” bringing to a climax the narrative thread of suffocation and toxicity that has permeated the two series. A maid’s dying of stress-induced asthma, a monkey gassed in a well-intentioned experiment, and a gasping, shocked lady of the house are all premised on the notion that the Holland household, funded as it is by the Hollands’ asbestos mining fortune, is a site of toxic decay.
Unlike the tone of elegy that accompanies the original 1970s program, however, the recent Upstairs, Downstairs strikes a tone that is at once both melancholic and quietly accepting of the ruptures in the status quo. After anticipating the cataclysmic event (the Second World War) for two seasons, it comes almost as a relief that the air-raid sirens are finally ringing properly, signaling the end of the old world as it has been. Diski’s complaint that costume dramas like Upstairs, Downstairs simplistically intone the idea that “Nothing will ever be the same again” is here countenanced with a degree of acceptance and relief that change is coming.[17] Upstairs, Downstairs engages, above all, in a dialogue with historiographical representations of the 1930s and also with developments in period drama itself. It is well aware of its place in the pantheon of reconstructions of this era and offers a number of self-reflexive strategies to indicate just how the narratives intertwined of the past are with some of the wider concerns of the period genre. The 2010–2012 Upstairs, Downstairs’ more nuanced and creative ways of representing the past than both its original version and films like Glorious 39 suggest that should 165 Eaton Place open its doors again in future, more radical interpretations of how the “past” is represented will again be possible. As Dr. Mottershead reminds us at one point when she responds to Eunice’s declared hope after Munich that the threat of disruption for the inhabitants of 165 Eaton Place is over, “This is history, Eunice—it is never over!”
Upstairs, Downstairs, DVD (Cardiff, UK: BBC Wales, 2010–2012).
Upstairs, Downstairs, DVD (London: ITV, 1971–1975).
Carl Freedman, “England as Ideology: From ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ to A Room with a View,” Cultural Critique 17 (winter 1990–1991): 82.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 92.
Ibid., 86.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 93.
Jenny Diski, “Making a Costume Drama out of a Crisis,” London Review of Books 34, no. 12 (21 June 2012): 32.
David Cannadine, History in Our Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 266–67.
This title of this section, “Shuffling Off the Heavy Cloak of Hindsight,” is from Martin Gilbert, Britain and Germany between the Wars (London: Longmans, Green, 1964), ix.
Glorious 39, dir. Stephen Poliakoff, DVD (London: Momentum Pictures/BBC Films, 2009).
The Gathering Storm, dir. Richard Loncraine, DVD (London: HBOFilms/BBC Film, 2002).
Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 27.
Ibid., 30.
William R. Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1977), 98.
Diski, “Making a Costume Drama,” 32.
Katherine Byrne
The Recent Dark Side of Downton “Downer” Abbey
Not since 1981’s Brideshead Revisited has a period drama come even close to dominating the television ratings, commanding public consciousness, and shaping popular culture in the way that Downton Abbey has done over the last few years.[1] Written by Julian Fellowes, ITV’s reworking of Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975) has, at the time of writing, just completed its highly successful fourth-season run in the United Kingdom and shows no signs of stopping there: the Downton juggernaut has also reached the United States, where it is currently attracting record-breaking viewing figures.[2] As a result, Downton has become a cultural phenomenon and an industry: enhanced tourism benefits from a heritage drama are perhaps inevitable, but Downton’s money-spinning abilities are not limited to Highclere Castle, the Yorkshire stately home in which it is filmed and that now receives more than sixty thousand visitors a year.[3] The series has generated several best-selling official book companions, numerous historical explorations of life below stairs in the era, dolls and other merchandise, and even cosmetics. Marks and Spencer’s Downton Abbey makeup, bath, and body range is the latest example of the show’s money-spinning abilities.[4]
Popular support is not matched by critical acclaim, however. Downton remains a guilty pleasure for many viewers: it is eminently watchable but at times politically or ideologically indefensible. It has come under attack for its socially conservative message: its portrayal of an aristocratic household in which servants and their employers live a mutually respectful, contented, and even affectionate, existence is, in many views, a problematically idealized representation of social history. I have argued elsewhere that Downton displays,[5] in a number of ways, a deliberate and carefully constructed return to the 1980s heyday of period drama that Andrew Higson famously, if controversially, bracketed as “heritage”: films that marketed Britain as a tourist attraction and that commodified the past.[6] In the views of Higson, Tania Woolen, and others, this was a genre that articulated “a nostalgic and conservative celebration of the values and lifestyles of the privileged classes,” through which “an England that no longer existed” was “reinvented as something fondly remembered and desirable.”[7] The most severe view of heritage film, then, suggested that they gave a superficial, sanitized, and nostalgic view of a vanished world and undermined the positive social change that had removed it. The focus of such films was, according to Higson, deeply materialist: the past was assembled through fetishized objects, from lavish costumes to the luxurious mise-en-scène and the stately home itself. This, of course, clearly recalls Downton, whose opening credits place an immediate emphasis upon lamps, soft furnishings, and other domestic objects, which are the historically authentic props that make the series a pleasurable spectacle for the viewer and also, in the early series, form an important part of plots concerned with the coming of modernity. Similarly, while the show aims to follow the lives of servants as much as their employers, it is the Grantham family’s glamor and charm that really command the attention of most viewers.
Of course, postheritage criticism from Claire Monk and others in the 1990s foregrounded the many variations and complexities in approach and politics between period fictions and also reminded us that “heritage ideologies—and ideological functions—are not specific to films set in the past.”[8] Pamela Church Gibson has also written about the ways the genre became, over the course of the 1990s, “wider and more experimental and now has the element of pastiche.”[9] With these issues in mind, Higson himself has revisited and revised his earlier views. He notes, however, that while heritage films “frequently focus on poignant problems in the English past, on narratives of dissolution or on the marginal and displaced as much as the apparently privileged . . . they also seem to offer decidedly conservative, nostalgic, and celebratory visions of the English past—and it is difficult to argue convincingly that the majority do not still.”[10] This is, as I have previously argued, true of Downton Abbey.[11] Its “vision of the past” can be described as “post-post heritage”: it does look like and feel like a self-conscious pastiche of the Merchant Ivory film or the Jane Austen adaptation but as an homage rather than in any way a subversive critique. It is also deeply nostalgic for a certain past. After all, it is essentially a portrayal of an attractive, ordered society in microcosm, where everyone knows their place, and servants and their employers live together in symbiotic harmony. And conservative it undeniably is; a paternalistic world like this negates the need for a welfare state, justifies class privilege by making those in charge worthy of their wealth, and plays with the viewers by acknowledging their reservations about luxury and idleness, and then gradually assimilating them into the visually seductive past portrayed on screen.
Yet in its recent conception, Downton seems to have altered and evolved, perhaps in response to those who have criticized its glossy view of history. Originally the drama rose to popularity alongside the newly elected Conservative-dominated coalition government and offered a mix of soap opera detail and escapist fantasy to an audience in the grip of worldwide recession. Perhaps in a response to the disillusionment that accompanies continued economic hardship, that fantasy has become more problematic and less rosy in the third and fourth seasons, however. The death of key characters Sybil and Matthew in series 3—the latter, most controversially taking place in the Christmas special, aired on British television on Christmas Day 2012—and the rape of Anna in series 4 have given a grittier feel to the previously saccharine Downton world. The drama’s previous representation of history, of course, had much of its darkness edited out. The servants are, largely, happy and healthy in a way their real-life counterparts from the early twentieth century would not have been; the First World War and Spanish flu claim the lives of only two (expendable and minor) characters; and Bates’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment for the murder of his wife is finally overturned, and he is happily restored to his wife and employment. Thus legal, medical, and political systems largely seem to be successful, to be working, even if they usually require a member of the Crawley family—most often Lord Grantham himself—to intervene (his appeal to the home secretary is the reason Bates’s death sentence is revoked, for example). It is this that is most problematically conservative about Downton: its portrayal of a status quo that is successful under the loving, paternalistic eye of the patriarch.[12] It is also, of course, one of the most seductive aspects of the television series: its feel-good sense of an ordered and secure world where your loyalty to your employer is rewarded by his care and concern for you, and in which he uses his power for your benefit.
By the middle of series 3, however, those systems are breaking down. The fracturing really begins with the death of Lady Sybil in childbirth, an unexpected tragedy that was greeted by an outpouring of grief from shocked fans. This plot was especially interesting because it can be considered the first direct way in which Downton engaged with the dark realities of the past. Even by the 1920s, the maternal mortality rate was still high at five fatalities per one thousand births, and “it was the only major cause of death to show an increase in the inter-war period.”[13] As a result, despite the medical advances of the nineteenth century that lowered mortality rates generally, thousands of women still died in childbirth every year, and Sybil is representative of these, as the Dowager reminds us: “Our darling Sybil has died, in childbirth. Like too many women before her.”[14] Moreover, her death displays a breakdown in the security offered by the Crawley household: youth, love, and privilege—which pays for the most expensive medical treatment of the time—does not save Sybil from her fate. As Jane Lewis notes, death in childbirth was democratic, in that elevated class status did not seem to positively affect the maternal death rate in the interwar years, unlike the infant mortality rate that responded well to the advantages offered by wealth.[15] Indeed, “Women of the highest and healthiest classes . . . despite their better health and physical development, had a higher maternal death rate than those in the lowest social class.”[16] Marjorie Tew argues that the increasing attendance of physicians, and thus increased likelihood of intervention, for wealthy women may have been responsible for these statistics.[17] It is not my purpose here to debate the reasons behind Sybil’s death, but it is worth noting that childbirth was, and indeed still remains, a site of struggle between a female-dominated midwife profession and traditionally patriarchal obstetrics,[18] and thus is an appropriate signifier of the gender politics that begin to surround Downton from this point on. Sybil’s death thus also represents a breakdown in the faith in patriarchal order, wisdom, and control, an ideology that, as represented by Lord Grantham, has reigned absolute in the first two series. Her father and his specially selected London consultant, Sir Philip, together make the decisions regarding Sybil, their authority sidelining the concerns of the village doctor, Dr. Clarkson, that she may have eclampsia. When the family argue over the best way to proceed, Robert stubbornly maintains that “I think we must support Sir Philip in this. . . . Tom [Sybil’s husband] has not hired Sir Philip. He is not master here. And I will not have Sybil put at risk on a whim.”[19] Significantly, Robert’s wife, Cora, shares Dr. Clarkson’s fears—“I would have taken her [to the hospital] an hour ago!”—and, of course, they are later proved correct. As a result, Cora’s grief-stricken bitterness and fury are directed at Robert, who despite being warned, “knew better, and now she’s dead!”[20]
Robert has for the first time in the drama failed to make the right choice and protect his family (in series 2, for example, we see him nobly giving up a love affair for moral and altruistic reasons). He and Cora are eventually reconciled, but from this point on Robert arguably ceases to be the moral compass and authoritative heart of Downton. Soon, for example, he is revealed to have risked the family fortune on some bad investments. Matthew intervenes, saving the estate from destruction and ruin, and putting it on the road to modernity, but Matthew’s potential as new patriarch is soon curtailed by his own death as soon as he has produced an heir. Thus, by series 4, Robert is able to be absent from Downton for months on end without being greatly missed (by family or indeed by viewers). Even when home, he is largely ineffectual: it is Mary and the former chauffeur, Branson, who plan for the future of the estate. More disturbingly still, the rape of his servant Anna and the lonely illegitimate pregnancy of his daughter Edith both occur under his roof and without his knowledge or aid.
Up to this point the movement away from patriarchal control in Downton seems to be a positive thing: the viewer is invited to recognize the increased power and centrality of the female characters and to see their increasing independence as a reflection of new freedoms associated with first-wave feminism. Edith’s sexual awakening (even if she is punished for this by becoming pregnant) and the range of decisions she makes regarding her child can also be seen in this light. However, at this point in series 4 the loss of the old stability and order at the Abbey becomes deeply problematic for many viewers. The rape of Anna, in particular, has had a dramatic and, according to many critics, negative effect on what the Washington Post described as the “tenor of the show”:
In its final minutes, the show descended into a wholly un-Downton darkness from which I’m not sure it can fully recover and that likely will lose it some of the more than 10 million fans who tuned in to watch last week. . . . Nothing prepares you for his violent attack and rape of Anna, Downton’s most likable and kindest character. It is an act so out of step and sensibility with what Downton Abbey has become that it feels almost like the worst sort of gimmick, an attempt to shock an audience that was just out for a nice walk in the park. Simply put, the rape of Anna and the grim aftermath that will surely linger the rest of the season and into future seasons seems too disturbing a turn for a show that is at its core a celebration of fluff, frivolity and fabulous fashion. Yes, there have been numerous deaths on Downton and moments of great sorrow and sadness. But to this point, the show had steered clear of any close encounter with evil. The show had been a guilty pleasure. Now the pleasure is, if not gone altogether, certainly muted.[21]
In one sense these comments indicate exactly why Fellowes might feel the need to inject some more serious and demanding story lines into the “fluff, frivolity and fabulous fashion” that Downton “has become” (or, indeed, always was). We might recall here Higson’s comments about the empty superficiality of “heritage,” and here it is apparent that such superficiality and the deliberate sanitizing of history it epitomizes have assisted rather than hindered the show’s success. This reviewer does seem to ignore Downton’s soap opera roots, however, and the inevitable confrontation with violence and evil that necessitates. A British review from the Telegraph understands these fictional conventions but points out that Fellowes is transgressing narrative codes of morality here:
“The entire concept of ‘story’ can pretty much be boiled down to bad things happening to people we can (usually) root for, which they overcome in the end through the power of persistence,” says the novelist Jenny Colgan. . . . But the problem is that Anna is morally blameless and in Downton the system is comfortingly portrayed as pleasant and paternalistic—whether it’s Carson dispensing homespun advice to Lady Mary, Lady Violet advising former chauffeur Branson on social etiquette, or Lord Grantham worrying about the welfare of his servants. “There is no redemption to be gained from this, only misery as Anna is thrown casually to the wolves of narrative rather than, as in the best stories, being led there inexorably by the world she inhabits and the choices she makes,” says Colgan. Realism is all very well, but when story lines verge on the nasty and gratuitous, a writer should take care. Fellowes breaks his pact with viewers at his peril.[22]
Fellowes’s slightly Faustian sounding “pact” with viewers is clearly based on the understanding that the show must deliver a certain type of entertainment and moral lesson. Its fictionality, and the rules of “story,” are here accepted and indeed prioritized over “realism.”
These reviews, and the ownership of the plot they imply, indicate the extent to which Downton has become national heritage: ownership of it is public, and the expectation that it will provide a certain type of televisual experience for its audience is crucial. Indeed, it is clearly more important to viewers than the accurate representation of the past—in which sexual violence was a sadly commonplace reality for female servants whose jobs frequently made them vulnerable to sexual abuse. As Ronald Hyam and Lucy Delap have observed, they were a “class of subordinate and sexually accessible women”[23] who had “no privacy, and may be observed at [their] most intimate moments” by their employers.[24] Of course, a more historically credible portrayal of the rape would have shown the perpetrator to be a member of the aristocratic family, given that members of this class frequently viewed their domestic employees as there for the taking.[25] One of the series’ source texts, Upstairs, Downstairs, had a similar plot in which a housemaid was raped by the son of her employers.[26] Downton is, however, extremely wary of portraying the upper classes as in any way irresponsible or deviant (the adulterous romance between Robert and housemaid Jane in series 2, for example, is gently affectionate, transparently mutual, and never consummated). The program thus avoids tackling any difficult questions surrounding predatory class relations by making Anna’s attacker both a servant and an outsider: the valet to one of Lord Grantham’s guests, Tony Gillingham, who in fact “doesn’t really like [his valet]” and is thus disassociated from his crimes.[27] Mr. Green—played by EastEnders’(1985– ) bad boy Nigel Harman—is an all-too-plausible charmer who reminds the viewer that life outside the estate is a much more unknown and frightening prospect.[28] The sanctuary of those walls, however, is undermined by this incident in a way that contrasts dramatically with the plots in Downton thus far.
Significantly, the rape takes place during a house party in which Dame Nellie Melba (played by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa in a piece of stunt casting) performs for the Crawleys, their staff, and their guests. While she sings “O Mio Babbino Caro” upstairs to a delighted audience and the family chat about the merits of Puccini over Bartok, Anna’s ordeal takes place unheard in the servant’s quarters. There has always been a contrast in light and color—as well as more straightforwardly in set—between upstairs and downstairs in Downton: the scenes set in the kitchens are shot through a dark, grey filter that contrasts with the brightness and warmth above stairs. No contrast is as dramatic as this episode, however: the kitchen scenes of violence are interposed with the happy attentive faces of the rest of the cast upstairs, and Melba’s high notes drown out Anna’s screams. The kitchen loses its usual homeliness and becomes a bare, empty gothic space: the final long shot of the hall, in particular, makes the deserted passageway resemble the set of an institution in a horror film like The Shining (1980).
This temporary lapse into gothic melodrama is a real departure for Downton but does feel like a significant turning point for the series and offers some kind of answer to its critics. This is mainly because of its self-consciousness and self-reflexivity: the contrast it deliberately creates between all we expect from a “typical” period drama—glossy, highbrow entertainment—and the disturbing historical reality of sexual violence. This scene of Melba singing initially epitomizes everything “heritage”: the culture, beauty, and art that represent that which is most cherishable about the past. Even the Puccini song she is singing happens to be the opening music of A Room with a View (1985), the quintessential Merchant Ivory heritage drama. Here, however, it is interrupted and undercut with violence that is disturbing to watch. There is a clear awareness that the Crawley family and their servants have been occupying a charmed bubble in which suffering and violence seldom intrude and that the viewer wishes to share that position. Immersed in their cultured entertainment, they are distracted from and oblivious to the horrors of a life below stairs that comes to represent a suppressed historical reality. The audience is symbolically aligned with them, except that while they are unable to see, we would prefer not to see—as the horrified public response (on social media) to Anna’s ordeal displayed.
That response accused Fellowes of exploiting rape for ratings, creating a dramatic plotline to liven up a series whose initial episodes were rather banal.[29] Certainly it is difficult to argue that violence against women is anything but gratuitous when served up for entertainment purposes, no matter how well acted and moving the scenes might be (Joanne Froggatt has been applauded for her performance here) and even if it may encourage dialogue about the shame and secrecy that still surround rape today. It is nonetheless significant in the way it represents a further crisis in the ideology of the series, in that the abbey, and the state in microcosm it represents, fails Anna: it does not protect her from violence or even support her afterward. Given that the Crawleys themselves are oblivious to what has happened, paternalism is not, as it has previously been, a panacea for all ills. Instead, Anna is a victim of a predatory masculinity that sees her as something to be used. And, indeed, the way in which the aftermath of and punishment for Anna’s rape are represented in the drama also focus on masculinity in a way that might be problematic to a feminist viewer. None of the characters show any intention of reporting Green to the police, or indeed, to Lord Grantham, in a significant indicator of the decline of his patriarchal power. We might recall here Upstairs, Downstairs’ treatment of its rape plot in which, in contrast, the victimized housemaid turns to Richard Bellamy, the head of the household, for help and support.[30] Instead, Anna is terrified that her husband, Bates, will seek his own vengeance, as indeed it seems he does—given that Green dies in a mysterious “accident” later in the series. This revenge plot and the moral dilemmas that surround it become the program’s most lasting legacy from the rape. Here it is helpful to recall Lisa M. Cuklanz’s discussion of rape on American television, in which she, discussing John Fisk’s comments, suggests that “prime time’s treatment of rape has more to say about masculinity and male characters than about rape as a social issue or as a problem for activists.”[31] Certainly Downton’s rape plot does not center around Anna’s recuperation and coping mechanisms so much as it focuses on her anxiety about Bates finding out, his frustration and worry, his detective skills as he uncovers the truth, and the mystery surrounding Green’s subsequent death. As Fisk and Cuklanz observe, it is commonplace for on-screen rapists to be violently attacked, or even killed, by their pursuer as punishment for their crimes, and such behavior is legitimized by the plot:
The extreme evil and brutality of rape also serve as a clear contrast to the detective’s behaviour and legitimise his use of force. . . . Although such violence is not always condoned by other characters, it is presented as understandable and is common enough to be considered a basic element of hegemonic masculinity as constructed in these programmes.[32]
This casts interesting light on the plot that follows the rape, which centers on Mrs. Hughes and Lady Mary discovering that Bates may be a murderer, and yet eventually agreeing to conceal, and by implication condone, this fact. Essentially, they—like Anna, who from the very first moments after being attacked, is aware that her husband’s reaction will be a violent one—reinforce and accept “the mainstream construction of masculinity as macho.”[33] Series 4 might chart a decline in the patriarchal power and authority of Lord Grantham, but traditional views of masculinity—at their darkest, however—are still being reinforced through the character of Bates. With this in mind, we might agree that one of the most objectionable things about Anna’s ordeal is not only that it is violence served up as entertainment but also that it is ultimately more about masculinity, and male identity, than it is about the victim.
This is not the only plotline that might disturb (especially feminist) viewers in the recent series, however. My final points regard the relationship between Tom Branson, the former chauffeur turned son-in-law, and Edna, the new lady’s maid, which makes for almost equally uncomfortable viewing. Edna is a classic cartoon villain, a scheming social climber who aims to seduce and exploit Tom in order to insert herself into the family. The same evening that Anna is raped, Edna acts what the viewer is meant to regard as a kind of symbolic rape of Tom, whom she plies with whiskey, comforts in his still-grief-stricken distress, and then has sex with. The next morning her carefully laid plans are fully revealed when she comes to Tom’s room and demands he promise to marry her if she is pregnant. The blackmailed Tom is guilty and worried for days before he turns to the housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes, for help, and in surely the second-nastiest scene ever shown in Downton they confront Edna with her crime:
Edna: I want my baby to have a father, and I won’t change my mind about that. No matter what you offer.
Mrs. Hughes: I wasn’t planning to make an offer.
Edna: Why not?
Mrs. Hughes: Because there is no child.
Tom: You can’t know that. Nobody can.
Mrs. Hughes: But I do know that actually. Edna’s not pregnant. Do you think she would have let herself get pregnant before she was sure of you? And she knew how to prevent it. Why else would you buy this book of instructions? Marie Stopes, Married Love . . . Once you’d agreed she would have got pregnant, don’t you worry . . .
Edna: What proof have you got?
Mrs. Hughes: Oh, none . . . at the moment. But if you persist in your lie, I’ll summon the doctor and have him examine you.
Edna: You can’t force me.
Mrs. Hughes: Oh yes I can. First I’ll lock you in this room. Then when he’s arrived I’ll tear the clothes from your body and hold you down, if that’s what it takes! . . . If you want a reference, or another job in your natural lifetime, you’ll hold your tongue![34]
The moral message of this exchange seems unambiguous: Edna has already had a second chance to settle down at the abbey, and any character throughout the series—there are, of course, very few—who does not repay the Crawleys’ generosity with loyalty is defined as “bad” and suitably punished. Edna is no exception to this rule, particularly as it is the kindly and sensible Mrs. Hughes, one of the wisest servants in Downton, who condemns her. This simple, effective morality is usually one of the main reasons for the show’s popularity, as Glenda Cooper indicates above, but here it is problematic for the viewer. As Mrs. Hughes is also the only person Anna turns to for help after her ordeal, the two plots—and by inference the two crimes—are symbolically linked. Mrs. Hughes is powerless against Green and is forced to let him leave the abbey without censure, but the housemaid can and will be punished. The suggestion that attempted blackmail can be equated with rape is itself disturbing, given that sex with Tom was consensual, if manipulated and orchestrated by Edna. Moreover, the violence of Mrs. Hughes’s response is extreme and antifeminist: Edna is effectively threatened with medical rape, over and above losing her job. This is a frightening and disproportionate punishment for seduction and opportunism, all the more so because Tom, of course, receives no condemnation—even though it is not the first time he has made this mistake.
Downton, then, has become a much darker and grittier place in the recent series. Sexuality was always problematic in the drama: sexual intercourse was punishable by death right from the very first episodes, when Lady Mary’s seducer, Kemul Pamuk, died in her bed. Back then, however, it had the element of farce, for the scenes where Mary, Anna, and Cora carry his body furtively through the house could not be taken entirely seriously. Now there is nothing comic about the show’s association between sexuality and rape—whether literal or actual—and with death, which occurs for Sybil during childbirth and for Matthew (and possibly also for Edith’s missing lover, Michael) after.
Moreover, morality itself is complicated and less black and white than it had been. In recent episodes in Downton bad things happen to the most decent of people, as in the case of Anna, and formerly good characters like Bates and even Mrs. Hughes show their dark side. It is tempting to speculate that there is a social ideology behind this change in tone: that Fellowes is making a point about the way in which society begins to crumble when the old order is challenged or subverted. Certainly many of these events are linked, in one way or another, to the increasingly ineffectual Robert’s decline in authority and control, and they are frequently the product of characters taking matters into their own hands, whereas in series 1 and 2 they would have turned to their employer for his help. Yet such developments seem inevitable as the series moves through the twentieth century and closer to the modern world. Many viewers might embrace the feminist progressions represented by Mary and Edith and the increasing autonomy of the servants, as well as the less sanitized and arguably more realistic view of the past offered now by the drama. However, if we regard Downton as a political allegory, social disorder—illegitimate pregnancy, rape, and even possibly murder—is the price that is paid for these new personal freedoms. And, in turn, the cost of a movement away from the conventional, nostalgic heritage drama is that the world offered instead is less comforting and more disturbing: a world that, it seems, many viewers do not wish to inhabit for it resembles too closely their own.
“Downer” Abbey was taken from Chuck Barney, “Review: ‘Downton Abbey’ Season 4 Off to a Mournful Start,” San Jose Mercury News, 31 December 2013, accessed 27 January 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/. Brideshead is commonly in the top ten of “greatest television shows of all time” lists (it was second in the Guardian’s 2010 top fifty, for example). For a list of the numerous awards it has won, see “Brideshead Revisited: Awards,” IMDb, accessed 9 September 2014, http://www.imdb.com/.
See Charlotte Runcie, “Why Americans Love Downton Abbey More than Ever,” Telegraph, 7 January 2014, accessed 20 January 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
See Morgan Brennan, “Inside Highclere Castle, the Set and Real-Life Muse for Downton Abbey,” 5 February 2014, accessed 11 February 2014, http://www.forbes.com/.
Some of these are discussed by the Guardian at Ami Sedghi, “The Best (or Worst) Downton Abbey Merchandise: From Makeup to Wine,” Guardian, 8 October 2013, accessed 2 February 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/.
Katherine Byrne, “Adapting Heritage: Class and Conservatism in Downton Abbey,” Rethinking History (8 August 2013): 2.
Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11.
Ibid., 12.
Claire Monk, “The Heritage-Film Debate Revisited,” in British Historical Cinema, ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (London: Routledge, 2002), 192.
Pamela Church Gibson, “Fewer Weddings and More Funerals: Changes in the Heritage Film,” in British Cinema in the 1990s, ed. Robert Murphy (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 124.
Higson, English Heritage, 29.
Byrne, “Adapting Heritage,” 5.
Ibid., 9.
Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 36.
Downton Abbey, DVD (London: ITV, 2010– ), series 3, episode 2.
Lewis, Politics of Motherhood, 38.
Marjorie Tew, Safer Childbirth? A Critical History of Maternity Care (London: Chapman and Hall, 1990), 99.
Ibid.
See, for example, ibid., 21.
Downton Abbey, series 3, episode 5.
Downton Abbey, series 3, episode 6.
Joe Haim, “‘Downton Abbey’ Recap: An Unthinkable Act Changes the Tenor of the Show,” Washington Post, 12 January 2014, accessed 14 January 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/.
Glenda Cooper, “Rape at the Abbey: Has Downton Gone Too Far for Sunday Nights?” Telegraph, 7 October 2013, accessed 20 January 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press), 59.
Lucy Delap, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 174.
For examples of the numerous servant/master rape trials in the nineteenth century, see Martin J. Weiner, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Upstairs, Downstairs, dir. Derek Bennett (London: ITV, 1971–1975), series 1, episode 6.
Downton Abbey, series 4, episode 4.
Harman played charming rogue Dennis Watts—a “young Dirty Den”—in the popular British soap.
Nicola Methven, “Downton Abbey Fans Furious Over Anna Bates Rape Plotline: ‘It’s Like Having a Murder on Teletubbies,’” Daily Mirror, 7 October 2013, accessed 3 January 2014, http://www.mirror.co.uk/.
Upstairs, Downstairs, series 1, episode 6.
Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 19.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid.
Downton Abbey, series 4, episode 4.
Stella Hockenhull
Parade’s End
At the beginning of episode 3 of Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s 1920s’ tetralogy Parade’s End (2012), the central character, Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch), lies in hospital wounded, suffering flashbacks to his First World War experiences in the trenches. The sequence commences with an extreme close-up of his bloodied face, before a dissolve introduces a kaleidoscopic and bleached image of his beautiful wife, Sylvia (Rebecca Hall). This shot is immediately followed by that of Tietjens’s lover, Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens), before returning to the more realistic and gruesome events at the hospital. The story chronicles the life of Tietjens, a wealthy landowner and man of principles, and his promiscuous socialite wife, Sylvia. Tietjens has joined up to fight, but the events that occur in the war form only one layer of the complex plot and backdrop to the love triangle with suffragette Valentine. The flashback and the optical effect of the kaleidoscope is a repeated motif in the serial, and director Susanna White introduces a variety of experimental, surreal, and perplexing images throughout this fast-moving drama.
Parade’s End, a BBC/HBO collaborative project, is, as noted, an adaptation of Madox Ford’s four-part classic novel. Visually, the serial is comprised of a mix of images of stately homes set in the beautiful English countryside, immoderate London dwellings, expensive and lavish interiors, and sumptuous costumes—all of which pay close attention to historical accuracy. In sum, the adaptation might be interpreted as a mannered production containing all the essential ingredients of a heritage package, while incorporating what Robin Nelson terms a “high end” TV drama.[1] Indeed, Parade’s End does not entirely conform to traditional heritage formulae; instead, the serial is dominated throughout by inventive and melodramatic imagery, and women are represented as independent and sexually promiscuous. This chapter will analyze the five-part adaptation in terms of its visual style, suggesting that Parade’s End has its origins in heritage drama, yet corresponds with what Nelson terms high-end TV and Claire Monk labels postheritage production. This correlates with a number of changes present in contemporary TV dramas generally, arguably as an attempt toward mass audience appeal.[2]
Writing in 2007, Nelson suggests that high-end drama signifies big-budget and elevated production values, with prime-time positioning on a major channel. High end does not necessarily mean heritage, and Nelson suggests that serials such as The Sopranos (1999–2007), Six Feet Under (2001–2005), Sex and the City (1998–2004), Deadwood (2004–2006), and Carnivále (2003–2005) also qualify for such classification.[3] However, most heritage/costume dramas do constitute high end, featuring highbrow or middlebrow literary adaptation, the best of British actors—those associated with theater and quality and who lend class to drama—high production values, and the export of Englishness abroad.[4] Traditionally, heritage uses country houses, has lavish budgets, and invokes nostalgia for “better times” when Britain was deemed at its zenith. However, much contemporary high end, Nelson argues, is now multilayered, multigenre, and generally hybrid in an attempt to appeal to a mainstream target market. Such TV productions might also adopt a cinematic visuality, using techniques associated with film, which require a more concentrated viewing response and an aesthetic designed for the large screen.
Claire Monk notes postheritage trends, specifically in relation to cinema, with some adaptations deploying a distinctive if restless visual treatment that mobilizes a distancing effect. She suggests that period dramas have altered considerably since the 1980s when they reached their pinnacle, and a whole host of examples now offer a departure from the conservatism of their predecessors. Additionally, she argues that such adaptations might now be reassessed in line with the increased integration of British film production into the global entertainment industry.[5] The changes, for Monk, take place through dialogue, camera work, and, significantly, in terms of sexuality, dating from 1993 with Sally Potter’s Orlando. She suggests that postheritage films are united “by an overt concern with sexuality and gender, particularly non-dominant gender and sexual identities,”[6] albeit noting that forerunners such as A Room with a View (1985) have sexuality as central to their appeal. For Monk, nonetheless, whereas heritage aims at authenticity and fidelity to the novel, postheritage remains faithful to its original source while offering playful asides.
Quality dramas of the 1980s and 1990s made way for more progressive techniques, and the new commercial ethos in broadcasting led to a postmodern, consumer-driven culture.[7] Ultimately, this period witnessed a market-led approach resulting in the resurgence of costume dramas and literary adaptations such as Middlemarch (BBC Two, 1994), Martin Chuzzlewit (BBC Two, 1994), Pride and Prejudice (BBC One, 1995) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC One, 1996). These adaptations, according to Nelson, not only appeal to a quality market but also champion popularity, with Middlemarch in particular establishing discontinuities in dramatic form and narrative tradition, while operating as a “national flagship piece with an eye to overseas sales.”[8]
Correspondingly, and in relation to more recent costume dramas, Nancy West and Karen Laird note a number of changes in high-end US/UK coproduction adaptations postmillennium. They are primarily discussing the US series, Masterpiece, and its predecessor, Masterpiece Theatre,[9] and indicate that changes have manifested that redefine adaptation. Noting six modifications in all, they argue that heritage dramas pride themselves on appealing to an elitist niche market; however, since 2008, Masterpiece has aimed for a greater involvement with a mass audience through marketing and youth appeal rather than aesthetic appraisal. Secondly, and in a similar vein to Monk, they note greater and more obvious sexual content in these recent adaptations rather than the subdued treatment usually associated with costume drama. In terms of visual style, West and Laird observe increasingly inventive camera work and editing, and greater innovation in technique in adaptations such as Bleak House (BBC One, 2005). As they suggest, “These cinematic examples reveal [that] the visual style featured on Masterpiece no longer plays second fiddle to dialogue, nor does it function mainly to infuse adaptations with pictorial nostalgia.”[10] Equally, they note variations in screenwriting that, they argue, now offer greater originality; also the production of identical adaptations has increased with numerous versions of Austen displaying “the pleasure . . . of having a familiar story repeated for us vis-à-vis a new adaptation.”[11] Finally, for West and Laird, the contemporary adaptation has veered more toward melodrama, bringing to the surface, through visual techniques, the subjugation of emotions and feelings.
Accordingly, costume dramas and adaptations have witnessed an upheaval since the 1990s, and twenty years on they have ushered in visual and aural innovations, arguably to cater to a more populist and less elitist audience. As noted, although West and Laird’s rationale is geared toward an analysis of Masterpiece since Masterpiece Theatre in 2008, it might also be deemed appropriate for the analysis of Parade’s End.
In some respects, Stoppard’s adaptation does conform to the tenets associated with heritage. Parade’s End cost £12 million to make, reputedly the most expensive program ever broadcast on BBC Two,[12] and includes established and theatrically trained actors associated with quality dramas, such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Miranda Richardson, Janet McTeer, and Rupert Everett. It is adapted from classic literature, observes close attention to detail in costume and objets d’art, and incorporates a few lengthy scenes of stately homes and the landscape. An example of the latter is seen in episode 1 when, through a short sequence of establishing shots, the spectator is first introduced to Groby Hall, Tietjens’s grand country house in Yorkshire. He and Vincent Macmaster (Stephen Graham), Tietjens’s friend and colleague, are engaged in conversation in their London workplace, when an edit discloses a picturesque rolling landscape. The image, taken from a high angle, includes a steam train in the distance, transporting Tietjens and his son, Michael, to Groby. A lone sheep stands to the left of the frame, the sky dark and menacing, and the image remains on-screen for some time for spectator contemplation. Sylvia has absconded with her lover, and Tietjens is taking his young child to live with his sister, Effie (Candida Benson), and this bucolic image lingers for a few seconds before Groby Hall, a large palatial country seat, is presented off-center, overtitled with the words “Groby, Yorkshire.” This image remains briefly in the frame, but Groby is again shown from a distant shot as Tietjens’s sister drives a pony and trap along its sweeping driveway. The above partially conforms to the heritage codes of displaying buildings of national interest for spectator contemplation, the landscape as a pastoral idyll, and close attention to historic detail.
Indeed, Groby Hall appears again later in episode 1 as a mark of national tradition and changing times. Mr. Tietjens senior (Alan Howard) selects a tobacco pipe that is strangely hidden in the depths of the great cedar tree that stands outside the main door. No one is permitted to smoke in the house, and Tietjens senior and his workmen hide these items in the ancient tree, a ritual that is well documented in the serial (albeit not in the original novel where a different emphasis is given to the tree). Indeed, the cedar also becomes an important symbol of power in the relationship between Tietjens and Sylvia.[13] From this incident, the camera cuts to the landscape, where a lone horse in the distance pulls a plow. Tietjens senior observes the pastoral imagery, commenting, “The motor plow didn’t answer,” to which Tietjens replies, “It will, though. It’s all coming.”[14] However, the main focus here is on characterization rather than settings, and the landscape serves two purposes: in heritage idiom it is placed for spectator contemplation to suggest inheritance, wealth, and permanence, yet through the dialogue it acknowledges a changing society, the onset of war, and mechanization. Much later, following the death of his father, Tietjens observes the same scene, but now he sees the motorized version of the farming activity rather than traditional rural life. This sequence is described by critic Gerard Gilbert as a “Downton-moment, and there probably wasn’t much they could do about that: a vista of the British countryside that Tietjens loves so much, bearing the imprints of large-scale modern agriculture.”[15]
If the Madox Ford serialization indulges its audience with the visual pleasures of heritage, it also distances itself from the conservatism associated with costume drama through adherence to West and Laird’s notion of innovative visual strategies. Similarly, Stoppard’s abstruse screenplay is challenging and cerebral with parts of the story told in flashback. Indeed, the opening sequences offer the spectator a visual and narrative roller coaster that condenses four years into just over seven minutes of screen time. As noted, episode 1 commences with an elaborate kaleidoscope effect, and this operates as a framing device for the opening sequences of each subsequent installment, developing into a repeated motif throughout the hour-long programs.
Following the credits in episode 1, an overhead shot focuses on a sumptuous room presented through a mirrored effect. In extreme close-up, the camera subsequently frames a glass chandelier, through which a table adorned with white flowers and other accoutrements, such as gift-wrapped boxes and a pair of white stockings, is visible. Again, seen from an overhead shot, a maid packs suitcases that litter the floor and, from this, the camera swoops gently to the ground to reveal the train of an elegant gown. The sound of a telephone ringing coincides with the upward tilting of the camera to frame a beautiful and elegant woman, Sylvia Satterthwaite. Framed through a gilt-adorned doorway, she answers the telephone speaking in French. No explanation or establishing shots set the scene, and rather than presenting the opulence and splendor associated with heritage through lengthy takes, arguably, through the self-consciousness and kinesis of the camera, these images disorientate, distance, and confuse. Indeed, the sequence avoids all obsessive focus of the house interior, instead fragmenting such detail and demanding greater spectator investment in the comprehension of the story.
As noted, traditionally, classic adaptations have a slow editing pace in order to display Britain’s history and imperial past. However, as West and Laird suggest, “Within the last several years . . . adapters of classic novels have begun to relinquish their dependence on this style, either by employing an ironic use of it or by abandoning it altogether.”[16] Indeed, White’s fast-paced introduction continues with the visual onslaught, a feature that West and Laird suggest is evident in other adaptations of the period such as White’s earlier TV drama, Bleak House.[17] From the sumptuous French interior, the camera now cuts to a dark city street, which, the spectator is informed, is Victoria railway station, London. Two suited gentlemen in bowler hats stand on a pavement; the larger of the two is Tietjens, and he gives instructions to a porter to take his luggage to the Dover train to Paris, thus narratively linking him with Sylvia, albeit, at this juncture, the spectator is unaware of the circumstances that have previously connected the characters. Tietjens’s comrade, Vincent Macmaster, wishes him well, before a subsequent shot revisits France where, we are informed, Tietjens and Sylvia are to be married. Gerald Drake (Jack Huston), Sylvia’s lover, and presumably the person responsible for the earlier telephone call, and the father of her unborn child (although the true identity of Michael’s father is never known), forges roughly and aggressively into the room and embraces the young woman; subsequently, seen again from the overhead position above the chandelier, the couple copulate frantically and incongruously amid the wedding paraphernalia.
Later, and strangely reminiscent of documentary footage, the camera cuts to an extreme close-up shot of the wheels of a train, its noise loud and unrelenting, before a medium shot places Tietjens seated in the carriage staring pensively into space. A further kaleidoscope effect suggests a time change that the spectator is informed is a flashback to “two months earlier.” In this sequence, Tietjens and Sylvia meet for the first time and, from his point of view, Sylvia appears visually disjointed, indeed divided into segments through the same mirrored effect that permeates the drama. The editing pace to date has been brisk, and this tempo continues to the final flashback before the wedding, where the reason for the reluctant match between Tietjens and Sylvia is explicated: seen from an overhead shot, Sylvia and Tietjens have sex in a train carriage. An immediate subsequent image reveals them together in bed, a child crying in the background, and White also uses an aural assault on the senses when she overlays the sound of the train with that of the crying child, Michael, who is Sylvia and Tietjens’s son. Michael, it appears, is now a small boy, and Tietjens comforts him by the window at Groby Hall. A further flashback indicates Tietjens’s own childhood memories, as he gazes from the same window toward the cedar tree on the lawn.
In all, the spectator has been introduced to Parade’s End through a visual offensive lasting, as noted, just over seven minutes, yet the narrative information is truncated and compressed into a time span of nearly four years; this indicates the pace and style of the adaptation for the remainder of the serial; and, although Parade’s End is an adaptation from a classic novel, the opening sequence provides no indication whatsoever that this will be a heritage costume piece. Indeed, the frantic pace of the editing, the mirrored and sometimes skewed presentation of the visuals, and the two explicit sex scenes noted above suggest such hybridity as to defy categorization. The sets, while accurate, precise, and visually rich, are filmed rapidly and inventively to mobilize an experimental and unorthodox effect and the objets d’art become symbolic and emblematic of the underlying problems and politics of the narrative.
White repeats the kaleidoscope and split-mirror effect throughout each episode to create visual interest and also uses esoteric techniques to produce surreal and elaborate imagery. For example, in episode 1 when Tietjens first encounters Valentine, he is playing golf with a group of men. This includes General Campion (Roger Allam), Sandbach (Malcolm Sinclair), MacMaster, and Rt. Hon. Stephen Waterhouse MP (Tim McMullan). Viewed from a distance, Valentine and her suffragette accomplice, Gertie (Naomi Cooper-Davis), are visible on the horizon, darting in and out of the sand dunes. From there, the camera cuts to Tietjens watching through binoculars. Valentine appears from his point of view, but as though a vision, she seems to disappear, leaving him confused and bemused. Her plan is to thwart their game as a protest to gain votes for women, and she and her collaborator storm the course shouting at the group. Later, she and Tietjens are forced to flee at night to escape the police, and she becomes lost to him in the mist. When he finds her, she appears through a white haze. Throughout, just as Tietjens has first encountered Valentine as an apparition, she rematerializes through flashback—White often using the same kaleidoscope motif or a blurred effect to invoke their first romantic encounter.
A further visual flamboyance occurs when Tietjens’s son, Michael, throws a coin into the well at Groby. Sylvia has absconded with her lover, and Tietjens has decided to send his son away to be brought up by his sister. Pensively, he waits with the boy outside the house for Effie to collect him. Viewed in close-up, Michael climbs up toward the edge of a disused well to peer into its abyss. He holds a coin in his hand looking into its depth, and from his point of view, it appears murky and bottomless. An edit reveals the boy dropping the money and then a further cut places the camera at the bottom of the well, the coin descending in slow motion toward the camera as the voice of Michael is heard slowly counting to ascertain its depth. Tietjens announces the arrival of Aunt Effie, but the boy continues calculating until, depicted in extreme close-up and slow motion, the coin lands, coinciding with an abrupt edit that heralds his exit from Groby. The sequence, with its mix of innovative cinematography and aural technique, operates as a commentary on the passage of time, the age-old traditions of Groby, and the heartbreaking separation of Tietjens from his beloved son.
Sexual candidness is another aspect that creates a departure from the classic heritage adaptation. According to West and Laird, “As Sarah Cardwell and other critics have argued, viewers have come to expect a subdued treatment of sexuality in costume dramas. Rather than provide scenes of explicit lovemaking, these adaptations have long conveyed sex through costume, dancing, and dialogue, have long transferred desire into materials, motion, and manners.”[18]
While this may have been the position adopted by the earlier costume dramas, “Masterpiece and its British affiliates have begun to incorporate sexually frank dialogue and graphic images into its series.”[19] This is certainly true of Parade’s End; Grace Dent, writing for the Independent, notes that the drama is replete with “clandestine moments of wild and morally louche, Edwardian sex in private railway carriages or cartfulls [sic] of big-hatted busy-bodies passing by manor houses ‘for tea’ but really intent on causing mischief with tittle-tattle.”[20] As noted above, in Parade’s End the spectator is introduced to explicit sexual scenes early on in the adaptation when Gerald Drake (Jack Huston) barges into Sylvia’s apartment in Paris, and the two engage in frantic sex, he ripping her clothes off her body and Sylvia baring her breast.
In episode 2, the spectator witnesses frontal nudity when Sylvia takes a bath. She enters the frame wearing a revealing robe that she removes, thus again exposing her breasts. Climbing into the bathtub she stretches out, lazily smoking a cigarette; Tietjens arrives to inform her that Michael is returning to his home with Effie and that she may wish to bid her child farewell. From this, the camera frames his embarrassment as he witnesses his wife’s state of undress, before returning to an amused Sylvia observing her husband’s humiliation. At this juncture, Sylvia stands, and her nakedness is reflected in the mirror that is placed parallel to the bathtub. “Oh go away if you can’t bear to look,” states Sylvia, and while he indeed refuses to look, the spectator is enabled a triangular view of Tietjens, Sylvia, and her naked reflection in the mirror.
Whereas literature adaptations always prided themselves for their fidelity to the original text, the postheritage adaptation, according to West and Laird, offers radical rewriting. Possibly in an attempt to appeal to a less elitist and more populist audience, Stoppard’s interpretative adaptation contains more explicit sexual scenes and greater emphasis on characterization and plot-driven narrative. He comments that, while keeping in mind the viewer, he deliberately attempts to create action not present in the book: “Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you’ve got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you’re doing, you always want a script to be a page turner. It’s very important never, ever, to feel above that.”[21] With a background as a journalist and playwright, this makes for an interesting combination, evident in this work although, significantly, the novel is also multilayered and highly complex, focusing very much on the inner thoughts of the characters rather than action. Clearly, as with all adaptations, this posed a problem of textual fidelity for Stoppard and White. Indeed, the TV dramatization almost omits the last novel in the series of four, The Last Post, which Stoppard intersperses into the previous three novels, thus reworking Madox Ford’s manuscript in order to condense it. In fact, in The Last Post it is revealed that Valentine is pregnant, and this prevents Sylvia from appealing to Tietjens’s high moral principles to preserve their marriage. However, in the serial Sylvia attempts to win him back by suggesting that she has cancer, a feature also of The Last Post and plausibly also interjected here into the final episode of the adaptation in place of the pregnancy strand.
Similarly, Stoppard introduces hooks to create melodrama and excitement. Whereas the book only hints vaguely at the sexual encounter between Tietjens and Sylvia in the railway carriage, as noted above, the adaptation makes the details of this explicit through Tietjens’s flashback to their sexual encounter. Additionally, Stoppard incorporates an actual historical event that occurred in 1914 into his version—again not present in the book: the slashing of the painting, the Rokeby Venus (Velázquez, 1647–1651) in the National Gallery by suffragette Mary Richardson in protest of the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day. In Stoppard’s version of Parade’s End, he writes Valentine into the gallery to witness the event, and the Rokeby Venus pose he uses later when she and Tietjens are to become lovers and she awaits him at her home. They have arranged a clandestine meeting for her to become his mistress, although this is thwarted by her brother’s unexpected return home. While she passes the time she imagines herself reclined in a position corresponding to the nude in the painting. Seen from a rear view, she lies across a sofa exposing her nakedness in an erotic pose. In this respect, Stoppard introduces a contradiction: Valentine, a suffragette, adopts a similar pose to the image that Richardson so clearly objected to. In Madox Ford’s novel, she adopts no such position, merely awaiting him in agitation. Similarly, Tietjens’s father is not a prominent figure in the novel, yet Stoppard again deviates from the original by including him in the first three episodes of the adaptation.
Stoppard makes no apology for his lack of close adherence to the book and, as Jeff Shannon notes, “‘Parade’s End’ is in a class by itself, and Stoppard has honoured the essence of Ford’s decade-spanning fiction without limiting himself to slavish fidelity. . . . ‘Parade’s End’ is a bit too sprawling to qualify as a masterpiece. It’s easy to miss details amidst the density of Stoppard’s dialogue . . . and some characters feel sketchy compared to the fully developed leads.”[22]
Parade’s End’s complexity is a point noted by its director, Susanna White, who suggests, “You can happily go off and make yourself a cup of tea in Downton Abbey and pick it up again. You can’t make yourself a cup of tea during Parade’s End, or you’d be lost.”[23] Just as White’s earlier direction of Bleak House was described as a soap opera meets heritage,[24] so White argues that, in a similar vein, Parade’s End “is like Downton Abbey meets The Wire in some ways.”[25] Indeed, whereas Downton Abbey has a straightforward plot structure, Stoppard’s Parade’s End is intricate, with many of the characters never fully fleshed out. However, what optically seems to resemble disjointed flashbacks is actually a close adherence to the written prose, a point noted by Rosemary Goring, who points out in her praiseworthy review that such visuals are “entirely in keeping with Ford’s fractured style in which his confusing time-leaps and random interior reflections are intended to represent the breakdown of English society, and the hero’s personality, in the face of the Great War and its miserable aftermath.”[26]
Rather than operating as “a custodian, lauded only for the way he preserved the original work under his care,”[27] Stoppard’s adaptation is interpretative and action packed, construed visually by White in line with, what West and Laird refer to as “the New Culture of Classic Adaptation.”[28] Nonetheless, if the target audience for Parade’s End was populist, then this aim was not fully realized. For its UK release, the serialization was divided into five parts on five consecutive Friday evenings broadcast at 9:00 p.m. from 24 August 2012 and, despite excellent critical acclaim from reviewers such as Gerard Gilbert who described the production as “dense and ambitious,”[29] and worthy of multiple viewings, audience figures declined. For Grace Dent, its Friday slot rather than the traditional viewing time of Sunday evening was senseless, or as she describes, one of
gross idiocy on the part of the BBC, which places a wildly cerebral period drama chock-full of British thespian hierarchy raining down dry bons mots on a Friday night. A scarecrow with one boiled egg for an eye could see Parade’s End is Sunday night, BBC1, 9pm, damp hair from a bath, comfy clothes, surrounded by Sunday supplements, mugs of tea and a half-hearted supper of cheese and crackers as one over-ate at lunchtime, type of TV. It’s Downton Abbey with a massive, complex brain.[30]
If Parade’s End was well received by the critics, it did not find the same success with audiences. Despite the popularity of costume dramas in both the UK and the United States,[31] by episode 2 viewing figures had plummeted. Laura Donnelly in the Daily Telegraph notes that “Parade’s End loved by critics—but viewers switch off.”[32] Whereas the first episode garnered 3.1 million viewers, by week two these figures had plunged by nearly one million to 2.2 million. Parade’s End’s Friday-night slot might be deemed inappropriate,[33] especially toward the latter part of August coinciding with a UK holiday weekend, albeit numbers were high for this particular episode. The competition for the following week (Friday, 31 August 2012), however, was stiff with the opposition including In with the Flynns (9:00 p.m., 3 million viewers), Mrs. Brown’s Boys (9:30 p.m., 4.4 million), ITV1’s UEFA Super Cup Live (7:30–10:10 p.m., 2.1 million), and Celebrity Big Brother: Live Eviction (2.1 million).[34] Consequently, as one critic suggests, some with an aversion to costume dramas may have missed the first episode because “perhaps you have a partner who threatens to put his head under the grill whenever a period drama starts so you have to watch Mrs. Brown’s Boys or Russell Howard’s Good News, instead.”[35]
Following its UK release, Parade’s End was subsequently compressed by HBO to three consecutive nights (Tuesday to Thursday) in February 2013. Again, it received equally good reviews from its US critics, later described as “way above average, as evident from the glowing reception it received when it premiered on the Beeb [BBC] last August.”[36] However, the serial was not as popular in the United States, possibly because, according to Tim Goodman, “it’s less soapy than Downton but also less successfully structured, more insularly British and far less interested in pandering—which in turn might make it substantially less popular with American audiences,”[37] and arguably, “audiences world-wide are known to prefer local product, given the choice.”[38]
That Parade’s End is high end is undeniable, yet the concept of heritage, including its various traits and iconography, is useful only in some small measure for its analysis. Apart from accuracy of costume and historical detail, and a few shots of stately homes and upper-class life, the adaptation owes little debt to its more traditional predecessors with their lengthy takes, birthright stately piles, and literary fidelity. On the other hand, Monk’s concept of postheritage, in line with West and Laird’s more recent theories on the changes from Masterpiece Theatre to Masterpiece, permits a better understanding of the drama, mobilizing a number of key elements for discussion and pertinent to Stoppard’s adaptation. Conceivably, and more constructive for a scrutiny of Parade’s End, is Robin Nelson’s notion of contemporary TV drama. This framework, while recognizing a cinematic aesthetic and complex cultural form, also acknowledges the industrial context of mixed-mode dramas as a trend in modern-day television. Indeed, Parade’s End owes a debt to traditional heritage forms yet affords a fast editing rhythm and visual flamboyance in line with other high-end dramas, therefore aligning itself more with American Quality TV.[39] This has favorable and unfavorable consequences in that the program is branded as a sophisticated and distinctive product yet is what Nelson terms “edgy”[40] and experimental—a facet possibly unappealing to an audience requiring the more traditional experience associated with costume drama. Also, despite being a major figure in the literary canon, Ford Madox Ford is not a name familiar to all, a point noted by Alan Yentob in an episode of The Culture Show (BBC Two, 2004– ) transmitted Saturday, 21 September 2012, and titled “Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford?” Here, the author’s perceived obscurity is investigated by Yentob, who describes him as “one of the forgotten greats of British fiction.”[41] Indeed, in film and television adaptation, Madox Ford has not been celebrated, acknowledged, or branded in the same vein as Dickens or Austen. Likewise, whereas the Jane Austen Society was formed in Britain in 1940 and in the United States in 1979, the UK Madox Ford Society was not inaugurated until 1997, and no equivalent exists in the United States.
Thus, despite its modernist resonances with US product, Parade’s End failed to attract its audience in the same way as did many of its more conventional predecessors, or indeed its rival, Downton Abbey. Whether it was because, in the case of the United States, audiences prefer home-grown products or a more traditional perspective on a classic novel, or in terms of its British broadcast, the timing was poor, it is impossible to speculate. In sum, as Nelson points out, contemporary TV drama in general is “not only difficult to classify but, at times, problematic in terms of viewing response.”[42]
Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary “High End” TV Drama (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), 1.
Claire Monk, “Sexuality and Heritage,” in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 7.
This is summed up in Robin Nelson, “Contemporary Serial Culture: Quality TV Series in a New Media Environment,” in Transnationale Serienkultur: Thoerie, Aesthetk, Naration und Rezeption neuer Fernsehen, ed. Susanne Eichner, Lothar Mikos, and Rainer Winter (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer FachMedien, 2013), 27.
Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester D. Friedman (London: University College of London Press, 1993), 114–15.
Monk, “Sexuality and Heritage,” 7.
Ibid.
For further reading, see also Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Nelson, State of Play.
Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997), 126.
Masterpiece Theatre is now known as Masterpiece and is a drama anthology television series produced by WGBH Boston. For further reading, see Laurence A. Jarvik, Masterpiece Theatre and the Politics of Quality (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999).
Nancy West and Karen Laird, “Prequels, Sequels, and Pop Stars: Masterpiece and the New Culture of Classic Adaptation,” Literature/Film Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2011): 314.
Ibid., 318.
Anita Singh, “Parade’s End: Who Is This Benedict Cumberbatch?” Telegraph, 27 July 2012, accessed 9 October 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
Sylvia, in a display of power, has the tree felled, much to Tietjens’s consternation.
Tom Stoppard, Screenplay: Parade’s End (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).
Gerard Gilbert, “First Night: Parade’s End, BBC2,” Independent, 25 August 2012, accessed 8 September 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/.
West and Laird, “Prequels, Sequels,” 312.
See Christine Geraghty, Bleak House (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). White took over from Justin Chadwick after episode 13 of the serial.
West and Laird, “Prequels, Sequels,” 310.
Ibid.
Grace Dent, “Grace Dent on Television: Parade’s End BBC2,” Independent, 8 September 2012, accessed 8 September 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/.
John Preston, “Tom Stoppard interview for Parade’s End and Anna Karenina,” Daily Telegraph, 24 August 2012, accessed 31 August 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
Jeff Shannon, “Parade’s End Movie Review and Film Summary,” 20 February 2013, accessed 8 September 2013, http://www.rogerebert.com/.
Laura Donnelly, “Parade’s End Loved by Critics—but Viewers Switch Off,” 2 September 2012, accessed 28 August 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
See Geraghty, Bleak House.
In Donnelly, “Parade’s End.”
Rosemary Goring, “The Bleak Brilliance of Parade’s End Needs No Comparison to Downton,” Herald Scotland, 25 August 2012, accessed 1 September 2013, http://www.heraldscotland.com/.
West and Laird, “Prequels, Sequels,” 315.
This is also the title of West and Laird’s article.
Gilbert, “First Night.”
Dent, “Grace Dent.”
Claire Monk conducts an empirical analysis of heritage cinema audiences in the UK. See Claire Monk, Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Donnelly, “Parade’s End.”
Stoppard himself argues that “rightly or wrongly, we thought Parade’s End was a Sunday-night sort of show.” See Preston, “Tom Stoppard.”
Jason Deans, “Parade’s End Marches On but Loses Out in Battle for Friday Night Ratings,” Guardian, 31 August 2012, accessed 8 September 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/.
Dent, “Grace Dent.”
Shannon, “Parade’s End.”
Tim Goodman, “Parade’s End: TV Review,” Hollywood Reporter, 22 February 2013, accessed 4 September 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/.
Nelson, State of Play, 23.
Nelson defines the characteristics of American Quality TV as expensive with a cinematic appearance that includes a “dynamic pace of action-adventure or at least a snappy editing rhythm and a highly mobile camera.” Nelson, State of Play, 36.
Ibid., 3.
Alan Yentob, “Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford? A Culture Show Special,” BBC 2 The Culture Show, aired 21 September 2012, accessed 8 October 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/.
Nelson, State of Play, 26.