Last week I had occasion to explain to the incredulous grandchild of a woman my age that when we were your age there was no internet, only a box called a TV and a larger box you walked into called a cinema. Oh? Yes, and rather than an increasingly infinite selection of URLs, you had only seven channels -- Canadian channels CBC (2) and CTV(8); a Bellingham, U.S. channel that came in fuzzy without cable, called KVOS (12); and cable channels KOMO/ABC (4), KING/NBC (5), KIRO/CBS (7) and PBS (KCTS) (9), all from Seattle. So you didn't get to watch very much TV? On the contrary, we watched it all the time. Like your thespian Nana, it was always on.
Later that day the three of us went thrifting, where I found the first season of Upstairs, Downstairs and held it up as an example of PBS's "grown-up" fare, in contrast to "kids" programming like Zoom (1972-1978). Zoom? Yes, Zoom. And as if on cue, Nana and I sang and danced the opening theme song -- "C'mon and gonna zoom, zoom, zoom-a, zoom ...," with me busting Luiz's move, and Nana Bernadette's. "Were you allowed to watch that?" asked the grandchild, pointing to the Upstairs, Downstairs box. "Ugh," I said, "there was nothing more boring when I was your age," and Nana nodded solemnly. "Will you watch it now?' asked the grandchild. "Yes," said Nana, taking the box from my hand, "if for no other reason than to find out what bored us."
After watching the opening Fay Weldon-penned episode, Nana and I concluded that Upstairs, Downstairs is brilliantly written and acted -- a brilliance that stands in contrast to its dimly-lit sets and occasionally caught-off-guard camera work. Could that dimness account for what bored us as children? "Hardly," said Nana, "it's nowhere near as dim as Dark Shadows, and we loved that." Which is true -- we did. As for themes, it isn't until the third episode, "Board Wages", that the class element is explored.
The picture up top is from a scene in the fifth episode ("A Suitable Marriage") that immediately follows the scene in the bedroom of seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Bellamy. As housemaid Rose is tucking-in Elizabeth, the latter tells the former how she has fallen in love with the visiting Baron Klaus von Rimmer, but doesn't like him much, and Rose has trouble with the paradox. "Oh don't be so shocked, Rose, we're living in modern times!" And indeed we are, for the year is 1906, and German spies, as we have come to learn, are everywhere in London, and like modernism itself, they are engaging in new methods of subterfuge. The scene that follows Rose and Elizabeth is of Rose walking into a guest bedroom, where she finds Klaus kneeling before the footman, Alfred, as he is doing up the buttons of his pants.
Distraught, Rose tells the butler, Mr Hudson, and he tells Lord Bellamy, who is already wise to Klaus's spying and has arranged for Scotland Yard to arrest him during a parlour room gathering later that night. Bellamy asks Mr Hudson not to tell anyone, but Alfred overhears this and, in the scene pictured below, delivers a note to Klaus who reads it, excuses himself and, along with Alfred, is never seen again. But as before, where Elizabeth's line about "modern times" precedes the discovery of a homosexual act, we have Sir Adam (far-left) responding to Lady Prudence's declaration of Adam's incorrigibility: "Incorrigibles ripen with age, like most other fruits."
"What's an in-cor-idge-ah-bull?" asks the grandchild, to which Nana, in the spirit of Lady Prudence, replies: "Someone who persists in equating homosexuality with villainy."
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