Goodbye to All That

By Paul Gray

The revels are ended. That white dreadnought of a house at 165 Eaton Place is deserted, although two weddings sweeten the sorrow.

Cousin Georgina has married her marquis, and Hudson the butler lets down his Scottish reserve long enough to marry Mrs. Bridges. It took him 27 years to pop the question or, as experienced in the lives of millions of U.S. onlookers, some 55 hours of television viewing. However measured, they were exactly what Hudson called them: "Stirring times."

Except for an understandable overflow of sentiment, the final episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, PBS's blue-chip 'British import, was of a piece with its predecessors. There was the titillating peek into the ways of conspicuous consumption: among other extravagances, the recipe for Georgina's four-tiered wedding cake calls for 16 pounds of currants. There was the history bulletin: Hudson snaps shut his newspaper (the time is 1930) and announces that two million Englishmen are unemployed. There was the subtle reminder that no servant is a heroine to her mistress: in an unusual fit of garrulity, Personal Maid Rose blurts out a childhood memory to Virginia Bellamy. Ever so slightly, the good lady's eyes begin to glaze over.

Upstairs, Downstairs has been a class act--in both senses of the term. Handsomely produced, crisply directed and intelligently written, the program substituted warmth and nuance for the pomp and circumstance of most historical chronicles. The accomplished players (many of whom reassembled in Boston over the weekend for a PBS fundraising celebration) wore their period costumes like second skins. They became what they acted, and learned how convincing their performances were. David Langton (Richard Bellamy) has been accosted on London streets with inquiries about his TV family's health. Simon Williams (James Bellamy) was once challenged by a pub patron who did not like the way the actor was treating his fictive wife Hazel.

Power and Status. Welcome though it has been, quality was only half the Upstairs, Downstairs story. The British class system--that stately quadrille of power and status--deserves some credit, both for flourishing when it did and then declining toward nostalgia. The series chose its central preoccupation wisely. On paper, it would appeal both to snobs mourning the good old days and to libertarians rooting for the rise of the masses. The program's triumph was that things did not work out that way. Those who hitched on to savor the Bellamys' fall from grace remained to grieve and endure with them. Champions of the servants found it impossible to wish anything for them but the secure positions they were born to want.

Just like the era it recaptured, the series had to end. Signs of entropy cropped up in the last 16 episodes, suggesting that the show would not hold much longer than the center of the household. After reruns of the final season, rights to all the episodes will revert to London Weekend Television, which has already sold the show for broadcast in nearly 50 other countries. Hopes for a marathon reshowing here of the whole saga sometime soon seem doomed by lack of funds. Upstairs, Downstairs will assuredly be seen in this country again, after separate sales to local stations.

Many such syndicated series achieve a peculiar fate: forgotten but not gone. However it is replayed, that will not happen to Upstairs, Downstairs. It has implanted far too many memories in far too many minds. There was the time that Edward VII came to be entertained at 165 Eaton Place for dinner (and Rose marveled at the chair which would support the King's posterior). There was Lady Marjorie going off to America in a ship called the Titanic. There were Richard's financial problems, Mrs. Bridges' pots of tea, Hudson's growing dismay at a changing world, and Hazel's pained middle-class presence in a household of extremes. There were also suffragettes and soldiers, flappers and footmen, love and death. It was grand soap opera, of course, but it sandblasted as often as it bubbled. It gave up more vivid characters, through plotted deaths and departures, than most TV series ever introduce. To all concerned, Ta. Paul Gray

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