James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo
In November 1972, the British press reported on a most unusual event that had just concluded at the National Film Theatre in London. According to the Guardian newspaper, “Blinking like surfacing potholers and stifling yawns, 60 triumphant filmgoers emerged from the gloom [of the cinema] . . . after surviving” a twenty-four-hour showing of all twenty-six episodes of the BBC’s 1967 serial The Forsyte Saga.[1] Rescreened as part of a celebratory series commemorating the BBC’s fiftieth anniversary, the show had quickly been recognized as important and influential. In 1986, episodes were repeated on British television in celebration of BBC television’s own fiftieth anniversary, and in the summer of 1989, the National Film Theatre again ran the series in its entirety, this time spread across two days. But the mocking, superior tone of the Guardian’s coverage of that experimental 1972 marathon suggests how The Forsyte Saga—like the costume-drama format more generally—would simultaneously elicit popular affection, institutional canonization, and critical snobbery.
Widely recognized as a foundational work for the development of a very British strain of the costume-drama television, The Forsyte Saga—based on a cycle of novels by John Galsworthy about the tempestuous lives of an aristocratic family between 1879 and 1926—had been first broadcast in 1967, initially as an enticement for viewers to retune their boxes to the new BBC Two channel. However, it only really became a cultural phenomenon when repeated the next year on Sunday nights on BBC One, and legends now abound of pubs and churches standing empty during its run.[2] Furthermore, the show’s marital rape sequence (in the “Decisions” episode)—one of the earliest depictions of rape on British television—is remembered as generating a national outcry on a scale that even Downton Abbey (2010– ), arguably the program’s contemporary equivalent, would not be able to match when its writer, Julian Fellowes, introduced a story line about sexual violence.[3] In turn, in the United States, The Forsyte Saga would be cited not only as a cornerstone work of the Masterpiece Theatre strand but also as being responsible for its very inception.[4] And in addition, the show’s exclusive focus on aristocratic characters—in tandem with its exploitation of the longer format—ultimately resulted in the genesis of the equally popular and influential Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975), in which its creators Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh deliberately redressed the class balance via interwoven story lines about the aristocracy and their servants.[5] In turn, Downton Abbey would use the same conceit of mapping early twentieth-century political and social change through the fortunes of a single family, as well as deploying an “open” narrative, not constrained by the narrative limits imposed by a literary source (as had been the case with The Forsyte Saga).
According to The Guardian report of the 1972 screening of The Forsyte Saga, only a hard core of sixty Galsworthy enthusiasts stayed to witness the charismatic antihero Soames (Eric Porter) finally expire after saving the life of his contrite daughter Fleur (Susan Hampshire); for others, “the almost endless stream of tear-jerking episodes proved too much.”[6] One of the “survivors”—reported to be a “prospective Conservative candidate”—acknowledged that only constant nudges by his wife had kept him awake, but a lady identified only as “Mrs. Tony Townes, of Pimlico” described the experience as “magnificent.” The Forsyte Saga may have been groundbreaking in its attention to literary detail, and in its budget (an unprecedented £10,000 per episode),[7] but the association of costume drama with “soapy” melodrama, and thus with a predominantly female reception, was already entrenched. Of course, the skeptical (and unnamed) author of the Guardian piece could not possibly have appreciated the significance of the marathon screening as a precursor, of a kind, to the “binging” pleasures that would later be available to audiences via DVD box sets and streaming services. In the early twenty-first century, Downton Abbey’s occasional capacity to captivate and shock initial viewers with unexpected plot twists could be deemed proof of the format’s continuing power as a communal experience, although it could also be regarded as an anomaly in an increasingly fragmented broadcasting landscape.
One of the central aims of this book is to trace the pathways of British “costume” drama (sometimes referred to as “period” drama) between the original Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs (both were subject to twenty-first-century remakes) and contemporary equivalents such as Downton Abbey. There is no escaping the fact that the phenomenal international success of the latter has led audiences, and indeed scholars, to revisit earlier examples produced for television since the 1960s. Inevitably, the mighty triumvirate of these three mutually influential shows stands in danger of obscuring what is actually a nuanced and varied history of popular historically set dramas. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Forsyte template was used for similarly long-form, and sometimes multiseries, adaptations of prestigious literary works such as War and Peace (1972), The Pallisers (1974), Poldark (1975–1977), and I, Claudius (1976), but another key strand of costume drama was war-set drama such as Colditz (1972–1974), Secret Army (1977–1979), Tenko (1981–1984), Wish Me Luck (1987–1990), and Fortunes of War (1987). The BBC’s House of Eliott (1991–1994), devised by the creators of Upstairs, Downstairs, and spanning thirty-four episodes across three series, would prove to be a swan song for the hitherto standard format of multicamera video production, and also—for a while anyway—the long-running, open-ended costume drama.
In the early 1980s, the domestic and international success of Brideshead Revisited (1981) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984) began a trend for “quality” over “quantity,” with producers favoring slow-paced but cinematic-looking adaptations of prestigious or popular sources; their high budget necessitated rarity, which in turn rendered them as highly promotable “events.”
In the even more risk-averse 1990s, the main British broadcasters prioritized feature-length (i.e., stand-alone) adaptations of popular genre fiction by the likes of Patrick Cornwall, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, and Catherine Cookson. Meanwhile, the literary adaptation was given a famous shot in the arm with the BBC’s rollicking, self-consciously modern Pride and Prejudice (1995), which brought about a wave of “sexed-up,” politically aware adaptations of classic literature by Austen, Dickens, Trollope, and others. Aside from the occasional experiment with soap-like formats (e.g., the Dickens adaptation Bleak House [2005], which was broadcast twice weekly in the UK in the manner associated with contemporary soaps such as Coronation Street [1960– ]), these “heritage” adaptations are obviously very different from—albeit generically related and critically bracketed with—the very recent cycle of open-ended serials written newly for television.
Few would doubt the significance of the upstairs/downstairs drama Downton Abbey, first broadcast in 2010, in emboldening producers to return to the Forsyte/Upstairs, Downstairs template of long-running and populist (it was hoped) serials balancing historical fascination with appealing characters and plots. The Paradise (2012–2014) and Mr. Selfridge (2013– ) exchanged Downton’s grand estate setting for prototypes of the modern department store but retained the panoramic sweep and symbolically loaded historical backdrop, while Call the Midwife (2012– ) was—depending on your point of view—either nostalgic fluff or one of the most quietly feminist dramas ever devised (or indeed both). Downton’s careful address to international audiences was also mirrored by genre-driven serials such as the crime dramas Ripper Street (2012– ; coproduction between BBC and BBC America) and Peaky Blinders (2013– ), set respectively in Victorian London and the Midlands of the early twentieth century.
The success of Downton Abbey generated numerous journalistic and critical speculations about its “winning” formula. As with the gently paced Lark Rise to Candleford (2008–2011), chronicling the everyday lives and relationships between inhabitants of the titular hamlet and market town in Oxfordshire in the late-Victorian period, Downton certainly had a nostalgic pull. But a detailed article in Time magazine by Graeme McMillan cited various alchemic factors that include its “occasionally hilarious melodrama,” its self-aware borrowing from soap opera, and a multinarrative, multilevel pacing associated with “quality” US drama such as The West Wing (1999–2006) and NYPD Blue (1993–2005).[8] As proved by the quick cancellation and critical panning of the BBC’s “dour” 2011–2012 remake of Upstairs, Downstairs, merely having a similar setting and historical framework with Downton was not sufficient, and neither was the canonical status of the original. Some commentators argued that the strictly stratified, ordered world of Downton was a fortuitous tonic for audiences in “austerity” Britain, alive to prominent debates about economic difficulty, social disorder, and stoicism in the face of adversity.[9] Others saw it as the harbinger of a cycle of “warm bath” television: cheerful programs with a “feel-good rosy glow” appropriate for the economic climate and long winter nights.[10]
Downton’s success in the United States was in some places interpreted in terms of its cultural exoticism, but some argued for a greater analogy between the “fairy-tale” class system of Edwardian England and the obsessions and desires of contemporary Americans. For example, Theodore Dalrymple, in the Wall Street Journal, identified the program as a “guilty passion” satisfying a “secret or vicarious longing for elegance without imposing the hard work that’s necessary to achieve it in reality.”[11] Similarly, Nicoletta Gullace observed the ambivalent appeal for female viewers seeing characters with only slowly developing independence yet retaining a “certain gentility and graciousness of living.”[12]
Although some of these programs, and some of this generic history, has received critical attention, this has often been within the context of the practicalities and politics of literary or historical adaptation, or from a historical perspective; as we have already established, not all costume drama is derived from a literary source or from historical fact, while some may be written directly for television yet have a complex relationship with factual or literary events and characters.[13]
The shows under discussion in this book are mostly examples that are either newly written or based on literary sources that they “eclipse” or subsume; in other words, unlike short-form or one-off adaptations of canonical literature by the likes of Dickens and Austen, they are not always defined, or confined, by their relationship to an original text. However, as already indicated in relation to Downton Abbey, it is nearly impossible to analyze UK costume drama without acknowledgment of the wider critical and popular debates around British “heritage” culture. Scholars and observers of British media and political culture have carefully scrutinized the relevance of re-creations and reenactments of a historical past—whether real or imagined—for contemporary citizens and consumers.[14]
Within the specific arena of British film studies, the so-called heritage debate around films such as A Room with a View (1985) and Elizabeth (1998) was chiefly concerned with their perceived representational conservatism (or otherwise) and their appeal to particular audience groups and fans.[15] Although mostly dealing with cinematic examples, this scholarship opens up paradigms of great use when thinking about TV costume drama, as they point to the genre’s potential for transgression, and the way in which it can provide a lens through which to examine the class and gender politics of both the past and the present, as well as notions of historical “authenticity.”
It is true that traditions of costume drama on television have—until recently—received comparatively scant attention, despite their continuing popularity with audiences, and the easy availability of canonical titles via syndication, box sets, and online streaming. This is partly to do with the relative infancy of television studies as a disciplinary field, but the dearth of close textual analysis of costume drama may be as much to do with practicality as snobbery; quite simply, longer-form examples of the genre require patience and time to interpret and contextualize.
Indeed, there have been ongoing debates within television studies of late around the interrelationship of seriality and “quality.” Now acknowledged as a loaded and problematic term, “quality” TV has tended to be associated with densely plotted US serials such as The Sopranos (1999–2007) and The Wire (2002–2008).[16] The transatlantic, and indeed international, distribution and reception of some UK costume drama adds a further complication to any assessment (should one wish to make one) of the genre’s claims to quality. In the case of our much-cited examples of The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs, Downstairs, and Downton Abbey, all were produced by mainstream public service broadcasters in the UK, although the latter two were made for the commercial station ITV (although, confusingly, the remakes of The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs were broadcast on ITV and BBC respectively). This may seem irrelevant to non-UK readers of this volume, but the evolution of the costume drama is tightly bound with the shifting attitudes and competitive strategies of the two main UK terrestrial broadcasters. However, for US viewers, such nuance is likely to have little bearing on the reception of programs extrapolated from their original broadcasting context, most likely into the long-running Masterpiece Theatre series, which has its own framing devices and context, or more recently into niche channels such as BBC America.
Just as US imports have often had connotations of professionalism for British viewers by dint of their comparatively glossy production values, so UK shows with populist impulses and specific political/cultural meaning to indigenous audiences can take on cult appeal, and a host of different readings, beyond their national context. And as our initial discussion of the Forsyte marathon reminds us, it is necessary to acknowledge the more active, complex scenarios of consumption and participation by viewers, both contemporary and historical.
A volume of this size cannot possibly cover all TV costume dramas, but we have selected those we see as most representative of the genre and that afford opportunities for multiple readings. The book begins with a series of chapters that represent the broad range of possible conceptual approaches to the British costume drama. Part I surveys trends in programming, narrative techniques, and the hybridization of genres that, while of interest in their own right as part of the history of the costume drama on TV, also highlight the larger social and cultural contexts of production and reception, and viewers’ changing tastes and desires.
Claire Monk establishes the crucial importance of the 1970s, a decade of TV programming often overlooked in favor of the more lavish heritage productions of the eighties, in order to lay the cultural, generic, and institutional ground for the British period drama as it is understood and academically framed today. The year 1971 marked the beginning of the Masterpiece Theatre/WGBH coproduction and distribution relationship between the US public-service channel WGBH Boston and the BBC (and, later, ITV). Through this relationship, prestigious and popular British period TV dramas found appreciative transatlantic audiences, and this association remains central to the US visibility of British TV drama as a “brand” and to the formation of “Anglophilic” taste among US audiences today. Monk also considers the programs of the 1970s as more daring and politicized, but also more populist, in subject matter than such recent hits as Downton Abbey. She examines such series as the suffragette-themed Shoulder to Shoulder (1974) and those with a significant working-class, feminine, class-mobile, or regional focus that epitomized “the cult of Sunday night,” from Upstairs, Downstairs to The Duchess of Duke Street (1976–1977) and Poldark. The unprecedented thematic interest in class and gender emancipation in such popular dramas both articulated and appealed to wider democratizing impulses that had come to the fore in 1970s British society, in a decade of unprecedented socioeconomic equality that would decline consistently from the Thatcher-era 1980s onward.
Though often marginalized by scholars, the 1970s, as Tom Bragg also reminds us, was the “Golden Age” of British television costume drama, and while Downton Abbey owes a significant thematic debt to earlier programs such as Upstairs, Downstairs, key technical differences still exist, highlighting evolving production methods and their impact on the content of the costume drama. In particular, a recognized and cherished feature of programs like Upstairs, Downstairs, as well as Poldark, was the studio-based mise-en-scène; filmed mostly indoors within boxy artificial studio sets, 1970s costume dramas had to rely on innovative narrative techniques in lieu of big budgets and “visitable” places (such as Downton’s Highclere Castle). As in the nineteenth-century historical novel, the costume drama’s historical narrative is composed within spaces that can be easily manipulated—such as the studio mock-up of a coach’s interior or the claustrophobic servants’ bedrooms of 165 Eaton Place, inviting viewers to its make-believe enclosed spaces—and thereby evoking intimacy. Bragg concludes that, despite, or perhaps because of, their self-conscious theatricality and playfulness, Golden Age costume dramas are not necessarily “historically accurate” but nevertheless bring the past alive as they depict the space of history as something other than a realistically achieved mimetic space.
The evolution of the British costume drama since the 1970s has been paralleled by an equally notable tradition of historical-based comedy, whether in the form of sketch-show skits or longer-running sitcoms and serial comedy-dramas. James Leggott surveys some of the key contributions to the canon of period comedy, from Sesame Street’s parodic “Monsterpiece Theater” to the most recent spoofs of Downton Abbey (Uptown Downstairs Abbey, 2011), making the case for the symbiosis of historical and comic forms as one of the distinctive characteristics of British media culture. While Britain’s rich literary tradition is easy fodder for satire (for example, The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff [2011–2012] spoofs producers’ overreliance on Dickens for “quality” TV programming), making light of specific historical events, such as the First World War, has inevitably stirred up controversy, as in the case of the Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) series; not only did the series become British TV’s most popular war program, but also many viewers, to the ire of conservative politicians and historians, believe this parody to be actual history. These developments in British television comedy clearly reveal shifting attitudes to the reenactment and consumption of history.
Just as the historical-based comedy is so dependent on the costume drama for much of its content and style, it is not always easy to pinpoint just what makes the costume drama a distinct genre. Producers of costume dramas are very quick to distance their programs from the less critically respected genre of the soap opera. Yet as Marc Napolitano points out, even “prestige” programs, such as adaptations of Dickens’s novels for TV, have elements of the soap opera, and he adds, it is this very hybridization that makes the serial drama so similar to the nineteenth-century novel that incorporated several of the melodramatic plot devices of the penny dreadful. Napolitano compares such series as Upstairs, Downstairs, The Forsyte Saga, The Duchess of Duke Street, and Downton Abbey to differentiate narrative approaches and concludes that borrowing elements from the open-ended serialized soap opera ultimately allows for greater experimentation and improvisation (as well as responsiveness to viewers’ reactions).
Benjamin Poore further considers the viability of such a production model and some of the tensions created by this hybrid of classic-novel adaptation and soap opera in his discussion of the BBC’s The Paradise. A loose adaptation of an Émile Zola novel, Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), The Paradise—as indicated by its second season, which has drastically departed from Zola’s ending—has the potential to substantially expand upon its source material. Mostly set in a large department store in 1870s Newcastle upon Tyne, where most of the characters both work and live, the series borders on soap opera, with its accent on human relations, romantic tension, and workplace drama, but also reflects a new production model of “composite sets” built for filming that almost harkens back to the studio mise en scène described by Bragg. Some of these techniques undoubtedly reflect budgetary concerns as the lavish “one-off” costume-drama production has become financially unsustainable, but as Poore argues, the generic indeterminacy of The Paradise is part of its appeal to audiences, whose appetite may be whetted by the possibility of a “never-ending story.”
The costume drama’s writer is of pivotal significance, as we see with Julian Fellowes’s total authorial control over Downton Abbey, but even those who adapt a nineteenth-century novel for the small screen can still achieve great technical and narrative innovation, despite the “closed arc” of the original source text. Perhaps the most subversive writer to examine, Ellen Moody argues, is Andrew Davies, whose two BBC adaptations of Anthony Trollope’s novels He Knew He Was Right (2004) and The Way We Live Now (2001) offer a liberal feminist interpretation of Victorian domesticity and masculinity. Moody closely analyzes Davies’s televisual techniques of filmic epistolary sequences, montage, flashbacks, and voice-over, critiquing and shedding light on the relationship between the original source texts and their adaptations. Davies not only undercuts the conservatism of these novels while exploiting conservative tendencies in heritage films but also freely adapts Trollope’s male characters’ psychological experience as they cope with the demands the characters make upon themselves while they attempt to enact sexual ideals of manliness and achieve financial and social success.
One form of innovation often overlooked by viewers and critics alike, who look for authenticity in the costume drama’s interior furnishings and clothing, involves music, but as Karen Beth Strovas and Scott M. Strovas demonstrate, music (and notable musical absences) transcends its role as supplementary to a scene’s action and emotional content. Their chapter examines the function of music in The Forsyte Saga (2002–2003), Upstairs, Downstairs, and Downton Abbey, not just for establishing the period settings of the dramas but also for the ways in which all three programs exploit music as a tool to define and intensify the conflicts of class and gender central to their narratives. Of the three, only The Forsyte Saga consistently features music that would have been heard and performed within its London setting; Upstairs, Downstairs uses music of an early 1900s British character, albeit newly composed, and Downton Abbey features a contemporary orchestral soundtrack. Strovas and Strovas look at the title music as well as specific scenes from each series, for example, Soames’s rape of Irene in The Forsyte Saga; Sarah’s provocative music-hall-style performances in Upstairs, Downstairs; and the scene where Matthew and Mary dance along to the gramophone as Matthew’s fiancée lay upstairs dying of influenza in Downton Abbey. They demonstrate how music deepens characterization, differentiates between the upstairs and downstairs ways of life, and defines and intensifies other potential class and sexual conflicts.
In the case of Downton Abbey, the use of specific musical references adds further layers to the program’s already complex relationship to the so-called heritage tradition of representation that is deemed so important to British visual and literary representation. Strovas and Strovas include in their chapter some analysis of the controversial rape story line initiated in the third episode of the fourth series. Some aficionados of UK costume drama may well have been struck by the episode’s juxtaposition of the “downstairs” sexual assault of housemaid Anna with an “upstairs” concert performance of “O Mio Babbino Caro” by Dame Nellie Melba. Here, not only was the real-life Australian soprano played by the well-known opera star Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, but also Kanawa was singing the same music that had been used as the opening credits for Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View, arguably one of the quintessential British “heritage” texts of the 1980s. The subsequent debate—in the press and among fans—was mostly concerned with perceptions of taste and precedent, but the choice of a highly coded piece of music for this pivotal scene was evidently deliberate and certainly readable as an act of provocation by the creative team.
The chapters in part II expand on the ongoing debate about what constitutes a “heritage” production, as well as how “historically accurate” such productions are and why such labels are more limiting than productive for textual analysis. Critics have been too hasty in their view of the costume drama as a purveyor of nostalgia, a conservative and superficial rendering of a myth of “Britishness.” In fact, as Jerome de Groot has argued, the TV costume drama is “flexible and innovative” and can “invoke complex models of historical subjectivity, confound expectations, and consider key political issues of the past in order to educate the viewer.”[17] As this collection demonstrates, series as diverse in content and style as Upstairs, Downstairs and Ripper Street equally allow for a critique of understandings of past traditions, including gender and class roles, and challenge models of the past.
The popular success of programs such as Downton Abbey seem to suggest a viewer preference for dramas set in the recent past, that is, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, as Andrew B. R. Elliott argues, dramas set in the medieval period demand our critical attention as they frequently harness those same values and ideas that characterize the more familiar kinds of period dramas. Surveying programs produced from the 1950s to the present day that center on the historical (and sometimes ahistorical/fantasy) topics of Robin Hood, King Arthur, and the Crusades, Elliott traces how the costume drama has evolved from a formulaic narrative into a more cynical critique of the British past, allowing a more introspective turn in its critiques of national founding myths and revealing anxieties about national identity, multiculturalism, and masculinity.
Not all of the costume dramas set in the medieval and early modern past focus on notable men of history. Sabrina Alcorn Baron compares Elizabethans’ interactions with their “Virgin Queen”—a person placed at the head of the political and social order—with the costume drama’s determination to transform her into “every woman.” While the essence of Queen Elizabeth I was manipulated in her lifetime to ensure that she transcended her femaleness to be a successful public political figure in an overtly patriarchal office and culture, twentieth- and now twenty-first-century television has reshaped Elizabeth I into a sexualized female stereotype who failed at love and motherhood, and thus did little else of consequence. In most television portrayals, in fact those touted as the most genuine, historically-based portrayals, Queen Elizabeth I, one of the most powerful women in the history of the world, is portrayed as a woman just like any other: weak, feeble, and in need of male guidance and support.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada during Elizabeth I’s reign has long been held as one of England’s greatest military achievements. And, as Mark Fryers notes, the Armada was something of a turning point, marking 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.” Re-creating another period ruled by a mighty queen, The Onedin Line (1971–1980) depicts Britain’s Victorian empire protected by its Merchant Navy and the unique character of the men who sailed in it. While the series evokes Britain’s heritage of landscape, and particularly maritime painting and nautical romance, it more significantly presents the sea as a masculine frontier, typified by a national mythology allied to strong and silent men made tough by the landscape. The Onedin Line’s cancellation, after a decade of international success, pointed to an overall declining interest in the navy since the 1970s. Indeed, when a ship does feature in TV costume dramas such as Downton Abbey, it is mainly to kill off an inconvenient character on the Titanic.
As does Fryers, A. Bowdoin Van Riper looks at male-centric costume dramas that place war and work squarely in the dramatic foreground and in the process subvert the genre. Rather than simply use war as an excuse for romance, the Second World War–themed series Danger UXB (1979) and Piece of Cake (1988) take place on the de facto front lines at particular, clearly identified moments within the war. The men at the center of the action are not of the elite leisured class who typically populate costume dramas; in fact, such men are depicted as buffoons and out of touch with the changing nature of modern warfare. The defense of Britain in 1940–1941 was led, both series suggest, by men who had little connection with, and often less regard for, the prewar order of things. They are men who laud the values of work and technology and win the war through mastery of machines. Though apolitical, they are presented as heroic because they embody the distinctly Thatcherite virtues of the 1980s.
In the updated version of Upstairs, Downstairs (2010–2012), the Second World War still looms on the horizon. The First World War dominated series 4 of its 1970s predecessor, leaving the upstairs son, James Bellamy, physically and emotionally damaged. The new master of 165 Eaton Place, Sir Hallam Holland, seems, according to Giselle Bastin’s chapter, just as weak as James Bellamy, an equivocator in his domestic affairs in ways that mirror the Chamberlain government’s confused dealings with the German leadership throughout the late 1930s. Although facing Hitler’s bombs by series’ end, 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 (a fascistic sister-in-law and Holland’s own adultery) as from without. On a larger level, Upstairs, Downstairs engages in a dialogue with historiographical representations of the 1930s and also with developments in period drama itself; it offers a number of self-reflexive strategies to indicate just how intertwined the narratives of the past are with some of the wider concerns of the period genre.
While Bastin regards the 2010–2012 Upstairs, Downstairs representation of the past as more nuanced and creative than its 1970s predecessor, Katherine Byrne, in her discussion of Downton Abbey, is keenly aware of the negative criticism that often accompanies the costume drama’s engagement with the history it claims to authentically re-create. No one can deny that Downton Abbey is faithful to the period details or the latest twentieth-century technologies transforming the large estate inside and out, but critics of the first two seasons of the series have faulted it for its nostalgic, conservative worship of the aristocratic lifestyle, reminiscent of the heritage costume dramas of the 1980s. In response to such criticism, the series’ creator and writer, Julian Fellowes, has complicated in the third and fourth seasons his original fantasy of a gentle, paternalistic order in which harmony largely exists within and between the upstairs and downstairs worlds. Death and rape now cast a pall on the abbey, and although the killing off of beloved characters such as Lady Sybil and Matthew Crawley, and the turning of fan favorites like Anna into victims of sexual violence, have angered many fans, Byrne suggests that such developments seem inevitable as the series moves through the twentieth century and closer to the modern world. The cost of a movement away from the conventional, nostalgic heritage drama is that the world offered instead is less comforting and more disturbing, and one wonders if viewers will be as willing to return for more seasons of a “downer” Downton Abbey.
Experimenting with the heritage formula may win the approval of critics, but this does seem to occur at the expense of fans’ tastes and desires, and this is certainly the case with Tom Stoppard’s 2012 production of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. Although it has some of the visual pleasures typical of the costume drama, Stella Hockenhull describes the innovative camera work and editing, inventive and melodramatic imagery, and depiction of women as independent and sexually promiscuous, which mark this production as “high end” and “postheritage.” From its opening sequence that compacts four years into seven minutes and ends with a close-up of a copulating couple, we know that this will not be a traditional classic adaptation. Fidelity to the source text is not Stoppard’s intention, but he does stay true to Madox Ford’s fractured style, capturing the breakdown of English society in the wake of the First World War and its aftermath. Lastly, Hockenhull notes that Parade’s End’s attempt to appeal to a less elitist and more populist audience ultimately failed to win over viewers in either the UK or United States who overwhelmingly preferred its rival, the less experimental Downton Abbey.
Even when the costume drama does not take technical risks, it can still be quite transgressive (within limits) in its approach to the sexual and class politics of the past, as the chapters in part III illustrate. Appealing—it is often said—largely to middle-class women,[18] costume dramas address issues, usually of a domestic nature, that speak to historical specificity but also transcend time and relate intimately to viewers’ own lives. The role of fans in shaping the content and reception of these dramas is especially relevant in this age of online message boards and fan fiction, but as the example of the “survivors” of the 1972 Forsyte Saga marathon demonstrate, fans have always engaged with the TV costume drama on an intensely personal and emotional, if less technological, level.
The writers and producers of these series have had to acknowledge this formidable force, as Julie Anne Taddeo’s chapter on the 1970s BBC series Poldark suggests. Depicting such taboo topics as rape and domestic abuse, Poldark clearly courted a predominantly female audience, but the more practical considerations of the BBC production team and the responses of fans who mythologized the character of Captain Ross Poldark (and the actor portraying him) often clashed with Poldark-creator Winston Graham’s feminist intentions. The influence of fans—described by some critics as a “Cult of Poldark”—has since been bolstered by the series’ afterlife on video and DVD, as well as the Poldark Appreciation Society and message boards whose members continue to debate the sexual politics of the Poldark novels and TV series. This type of interaction with the costume drama also disrupts any notion (as typically perpetuated by critics) of the female fan as a mindless viewer of “fluff.”
The intellectual and emotional engagement of fans with the costume drama is further illustrated by the rise of online fan fiction, which has rapidly become a genre in its own right. As Andrea Schmidt demonstrates, Internet fan fiction sites based on Downton Abbey both respond to and potentially influence the series itself. The conservative impulse at the heart of the series, and the aristocratic posturing of its creator and writer, Julian Fellowes, especially come under harsh criticism from fan fiction writers. On websites such as Fanfiction.net, contributors publish their own version of events, alternative love stories (especially of the homoerotic variety), and parodies, and engage with other readers of the site; ultimately, the Downton fan fiction boards provide an important space for viewers to work through and challenge what they consider a portrayal of history and gender, as well as class and race, in need of serious revision. As Schmidt demonstrates, fan fiction has the potential, if not to solve, at least to bring attention to, problematic depictions of the past perpetuated by Fellowes in Downton (and assign the series’ female characters greater sexual agency and narrative depth in the process).
That Downton Abbey has fueled such an online wealth of fiction by fans speaks to the enormous cultural influence of this series. Fellowes’s meticulous attention to period detail has also stirred up a longing by fans to “own” a piece of the past he has imagined on the small screen, a longing that has easily been satisfied by marketing Downton-themed and -branded beauty products, jewelry and accessories, and excursions to Highclere Castle. The displays of opulence and pleasures of consumerism associated with Downton Abbey are also a prominent feature of the two recent department-store-themed series, The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge (the latter another Andrew Davies creation), and as Andrea Wright explains in her chapter, spectacle and shopping are also bound up with gender representation, class structures, and social change. Comparing the two series in which the ambitious owners and managers of the department store are all male with their closest predecessor, The House of Eliott (1991–1994), about the developing couture business of two genteel and independent sisters, Wright observes that, while familiar in some respects, the earlier series offered much more exciting and transgressive representations of femininity. Even as the salesgirls in The Paradise and Mr. Selfridge struggle to rise up the stores’ hierarchy, they are constantly faced with a choice of love versus financial independence, and the women all pay much higher prices for their sexual transgressions—probably more historically accurate but also much more disappointing for twenty-first-century viewers.
The competitive spirit of the department store in Mr. Selfridge and The Paradise infects all of its employees, including the female clerks, who compete with each other not only for commissions but also for the attentions of the men with or for whom they work. Therefore it is refreshing to see a true sisterhood at work in Call the Midwife, what Louise FitzGerald calls a rare paradigm in a postfeminist culture that encourages female misogyny. Based on Jenny Lee’s memoirs of her experiences as a midwife in a prefeminist era, Call the Midwife does not shy away from such controversial issues as domestic abuse, rape, incest, and abortion, but conflicts are too easily resolved, and the program’s superficial treatment of race and class in London’s East End of the 1950s further problematizes the recent impulse by journalists and other scholars to read Call the Midwife as feminist TV. Call the Midwife, FitzGerald suggests, might seem radical in its cultural presentation of women, but its feminism is safe and contained within the past.
When another taboo topic, homosexuality, is tackled by the costume drama, the immediate context of the program’s production and viewer reception must also be taken into account. Lucy Brown compares the fates of two footmen, both homosexual, in the 1970s version of Upstairs, Downstairs and the more recent series, Downton Abbey. The staff and upstairs family at 165 Eaton Place cannot even bring themselves to utter the word “homosexual,” and Albert’s trajectory, from illicit lover of an aristocratic household guest to executed murderer of another male lover, was quite daring for 1970s television, even as it reinforced both Edwardian and late twentieth-century prejudices about the homosexual as a deviant type. Meanwhile, Downton Abbey’s gay footman, Thomas, while often hated by viewers, is disliked not because of his sexual orientation but for his scheming ways that often hurt his more kindly coworkers and employers. Thomas does exist within the confines of the criminalization of homosexuality (and barely escapes arrest in series 3), but the twenty-first-century mindset of Downton Abbey’s writer and viewers does not allow for the same ending for Thomas as that which befell Alfred forty years earlier on Upstairs, Downstairs.
Alfred’s violent crime is never shown on camera, and the costume drama as a whole has tended to shy away from graphic depictions of violence; not so, however, with the recent police costume drama Ripper Street, whose weekly body count seems to keep growing. However, it would be foolish to read this series about lawmen, themselves of dubious morals, fighting crimes (and having a lot of sex with prostitutes) in the post-Ripper Whitechapel slums as a continuation of the misogynistic, violent “new lad” tradition that dominated 1990s British cinema and TV. Elke Weissmann looks at this BBC–BBC America coproduction as a way to understand how a transnational mix of a distinctly British costume-drama genre with the American crime drama and Western leads to a more complicated and fractured depiction of masculinity and heroism. The lawmen at the center of the series, while undeniably quick with a gun (and fists and knives), are traumatized by violence, inadequate at yet often yearning for domesticity, and very relatable to twenty-first-century viewers. Its popular success also suggests a possible template for the future development of the UK costume drama.
Ripper Street’s self-conscious grittiness and its reimagining of late-Victorian London as a steampunked Wild West seems, on the surface, to place it outside the mainstream of a tradition of British costume drama most obviously represented by the likes of Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what those marathon viewers of The Forsyte Saga would have made of Ripper Street, or even Downton for that matter. But in ranging across a broad (and yet far from exhaustive) assortment of examples, the contributors to this volume identify sufficient commonalities and continuities to justify and demand further scrutiny of the British costume drama. This is a history of popular television that has tended to be critically overlooked, or dismissed in oversimplistic terms; one might cite here, for example, the historian Simon Schama’s judgment of Downton Abbey, and the British period drama more generally, as “servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia.”[19] The chapters in this volume hopefully go some way to addressing the social and political contexts that have shaped the genre (if it indeed can be recognized as one), as well as the changing geohistorical contexts in which programs are re-viewed and reinterpreted by a thriving twenty-first-century global fan culture. In so doing, Upstairs and Downstairs is both an interdisciplinary intervention within the expanding, exciting field of television studies and an argument for the value of television texts in the understanding of broader cultural, political, and industrial trends.
“The Longest Picture Show,” Guardian, 6 November 1972, 28.
See Joe Moran, Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (London: Profile Books, 2013), 174–77. For an example of a citation of the legendary status of Forsyte’s impact on viewers, see Richard and Judy, “Life Below Stairs Was Very Tough in the Downton Era,” Express, 12 October 2013, accessed 20 January 2014, http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/richard-and-judy). Moran gives a nuanced account and slight debunking of the “legend” that the success of the “Sunday night period drama,” as represented by The Forsyte Saga, hastened the decline of church attendance. He quotes Ronald Blythe’s comment that the “demise of Evensong” was due to “the best television of the week, plus, I used to suspect, some connivance by the clergy to rid themselves of this service.” Ronald Blythe, The Bookman’s Tale (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2009), 88.
For an account of the Downton Abbey controversy, see, for example, Sabrina Sweeney, “Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes defends story line,” BBC News, 8 October 2013, accessed 20 January 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/.
For a detailed account of the genesis of Masterpiece Theatre, see Rebecca Eaton, Making Masterpiece: 25 Years behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! On PBS (New York: Viking, 2013).
For an account of the origins of Upstairs, Downstairs, see Deirdre O’Brien, “‘I Always Wanted to Be the Maid, Not the Lady’: Upstairs Downstairs Creator and star Jean Marsh on Revival of the Classic Costume Drama,” Sunday Mirror, 9 February 2012, 19.
“The Longest Picture Show,” 28.
Sergio Angelini, “The Forsyte Saga,” ScreenOnline, accessed 20 January 2014, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/.
Graeme McMillan, “‘I Must Have Said It Wrong’: Decoding Downton Abbey’s Television DNA,” Time, 4 January 2013, accessed 21 January 2014, http://time.com/entertainment.
See, for example, “Downton, a Remedy for Our Chaotic Lives: Women Delight in Being Transported to a More Orderly Time,” Mail Online, 13 September 2013, accessed 21 January 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.
Vicky Frost, “Less Grit Please: The Rise of ‘Warm Bath’ Television: Feelgood Dramas Are Spreading beyond Their Sunday Night Slots,” Guardian, 19 January 2013, 17.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Secret Appeal of ‘Downton Abbey,’” Wall Street Journal, 4 February 2012, accessed 21 January 2014, http://online.wsj.com/.
Nicoletta Gullace, quoted in “UNH British Historian Explains Appeal of Downton Abbey,” 13 December 2012, accessed 21 January 2014, http://www.unh.edu/.
Some examples of scholarship dealing with the interrelationship of history and television are Ann Gray and Erin Bell, History on Television (London: Routledge, 2012); Helen Wheatley, “Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs and the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s,” in ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years, ed. C. Johnson and R. Turnock, 143–58 (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2005); and Rachel Moseley, “‘It’s a Wild Country, Wild . . . Passionate . . . Strange’: Poldark and the Place-Image of Cornwall,” Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 2 (2013): 218–37.
See, for example, Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009); Amy Sargeant, “Making and Selling Heritage Culture: Style and Authenticity in Historical Film and Television,” in British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000); and Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
See, for example, Claire Monk, Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
See, for example, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds., Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London: Tauris, 2007); Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, eds., Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television (London: Routledge, 2011).
De Groot, Consuming History, 184.
Ibid.
Simon Schama, “Why Americans Have Fallen for Snobby ‘Downton Abbey,’” Newsweek, 16 January 2012, accessed 21 January 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/.