Television: Return to Eaton Place

Upstairs, Downstairs is back with eight new episodes

It is time for gushing: Upstairs, Downstairs is back, and our old friends have returned to 165 Eaton Place, which now looks more like home than home itself. Mrs. Bridges is making game pies in the kitchen; Roberts, milady’s personal maid, is minding everybody’s business but her own; and Rose, our own Rose, is looking noble. Upstairs, Lady Marjorie is reigning once more as empress of the morning room, stopping from time to time to arch an autocratic eyebrow at Husband Richard Bellamy. Daughter Elizabeth has caught a bad case of socialism, and Son James is dallying with Sarah, the underhouse parlormaid. Keeping everyone in place, of course, is the butler Hudson, better known as the admirable Hudson.

The series, which PBS’s Masterpiece Theater began showing in 1974, finished its American run in the spring of 1977—to universal wailing and desperate cries of anguish from several million devoted fans. A Manhattan distributor, Group IV, picked up the rerun rights when the PBS deal ran out. Starting at various times this month and in the next several weeks, Upstairs, Downstairs will be shown on 46 commercial stations around the country.

PBS originally showed 55 hours, following the Bellamy family from 1903, at the beginning of the golden Edwardian age, to 1930, when both family and country had fallen upon hard times. Group IV plans to show 39 episodes, taking the Bellamys only up to 1914 and the start of World War I. The best news, however, is that eight of the 39 are the famous missing hours, those episodes that Masterpiece Theater unaccountably deemed inferior and therefore failed to show in the U.S. For those who love the Bellamys, the broadcast of the lost eight is a signal cultural event, almost as important as if someone were to discover the missing fragments of the Satyricon or the diary of Lord Byron.

The first episode, and the only one shown out of sequence, is the most renowned of the missing hours—Lady Marjorie’s affair. James brings home an army friend, Captain Hammond (David Kernan), and Lady Marjorie and the visitor learn, over the inevitable tea in the morning room, that they share a love of opera. Richard Bellamy (David Langton), always preoccupied with the House of Commons, gratefully asks their guest to take his place and escort his wife to Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden. Naturally they fall in love over a Liebestrank, and soon the magnificent Lady Marjorie (Rachel Gurney) is cavorting in Hammond’s bed, away from home, husband and servants.

The servants are not away from her, however. Roberts (Patsy Smart) is quickly fishing Hammond’s notes out of the fire and alerting the staff to a danger in the household. Such things run in Lady Marjorie’s family, she sniffs; it was not for nothing that her aunt was known as “the Bolter.” Before the servants can step in, Richard finds out and gently reminds his wife that their marriage is built upon loyalty. In perhaps the sudsiest scene, Lady Marjorie gives up her young man, the Roddy Llewellyn of 1906. “I have loved you as I never have a man and never will again,” she says, as the Liebestod wells up in the background.

All together, the new episodes have a more lurid color than the old ones. In one, Elizabeth (the stunning Nicola Pagett) discovers that her poet husband (Ian Ogilvy) is impotent, at least as far as women are concerned. Turning pimp, he persuades his publisher to perform his husbandly duties upstairs while he reads his drivel to a party in the drawing room. In another, Sarah (Pauline Collins), who has quit her downstairs job, returns to disrupt the other servants with seances and other outlandish acts. It is hinted that she and Rose (Jean Marsh, co-creator of the series) had had an affair when Sarah was there before. Speaking of Rose’s current roommate, Sarah says, “I’ll bet she’s not as warm to snuggle up to as I was.” Rose a lesbian! What next at Eaton Place?

Lurid or not, the writing is almost always first-rate, an oasis of literacy in the vast wasteland. When Elizabeth wants a motorcar, for example, she tells her husband that it has all of 18 horsepower. “What,” he demands, “do you know about horsepower?” “Anyone can understand horsepower,” she replies matter-of-factly. “It’s a most evocative phrase.”

Upstairs, Downstairs is not high drama, and it may not even be drama at all. It is soap opera, the most exalted soap opera ever to be shown on TV. For the addicted there is still one final fix. The syndicators are holding back five additional early episodes, which were shot in black and white. They will be released if this series is a success. Can there be any doubt?