DVD: Upstairs Downstairs

The story continues, with a hole or two where main characters should be

When it was broadcast over Christmas the jury was split on Upstairs Downstairs. Some were spitting with rage at the temerity inherent in the idea of revisiting 165 Eaton Place (though the street exteriors, it's revealed on the DVD documentary, were actually shot in Leamington Spa). Never mind that Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins owned the rights and could do as they pleased with their property. Others seemed to forgive them their trespasses.

Its appearance while the nation was still recovering from a massive fix of genuflection porn in Downton Abbey gave Heidi Thomas’s fresh cast of characters – all excepting Marsh’s Rose Buck – less space to breathe than they will now get on DVD. As she explains here, Thomas had wanted to write a sequel to the famous series since she was 11 years old. When she got the chance, she set it in 1936 as Herr Von Ribbentrop, Oswald Mosley and Mrs Simpson flitted about town sowing destruction in meeting halls and drawing rooms.

Upstairs this time round are Sir Hallam Holland and his wife, Lady Agnes, joined by his very grand mother and her stroppy little sister. Downstairs, along with Marsh, are a surly cook, a cockney maid, a northern footman and a classically repressed butler. The plots weave the events of the age into the usual fussy narratives about etiquette and propriety. It looks ravishing. The cast is as good as you'd expect. Atkins as the mother-in-law from hell (actually the Raj, from which she also brings back a turbanned amanuensis) is a treat. If the revival has a really serious flaw, it is that Thomas's scripts left a gaping hole where the Hollands’ characters are meant to be. Keeley Hawes gushes in the documentary how much she loved her role and the costumes (in truth, they all do), but even the climactic birth of a baby delivered by Adrian Scarborough’s butler cannot paper over the cracks. They’ll need to plug that gap in series two. Until then, the jury is still out.

 

CLAIRE FOY’S CV

Claire Foy in Little DorritLittle Dorrit (2008). “Dickens did just see her as homely, angelic and giving. I looked on her as a sort of a carer whose parent or child is ill. That made her believable in my head.”

Upstairs Downstairs (2010-12). Lady Persephone, posh little brown shirt based on the Hitler-obsessed Unity Mitford, tops herself in a dramatic exit from the second series.

The Night Watch (2011). Foy plays a troubled lesbian toy girl in an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel about heartache in the Blitz (pictured below with Anna Maxwell Martin)

Claire Foy and Anna Maxwell Martin in The Night WatchWreckers (2011). Foy is wife to Benedict Cumberbatch in fraught low-budget Fenland drama

The Promise (2011). In Peter Kosminsky’s epic historical drama, Foy plays Erin Matthews, an 18-year-old obsessed with investigating the story of the British soldiers serving in Palestine in the years before our ignominious exit.  “I just recognised quite a lot of things about me when I was her age.”

White Heat (2012). Foy is a feminist child of the Sixties who grows up to become Juliet Stevenson.

Hacks (2012). Guy Jenkin comedy inspired by the hacking scandal, in which Foy's feral tabloid editor Kate Loy is not remotely based on to Rebekah Brooks. A rare comic outing for an actress with natural funny bones.

Claire Foy and Victoria Hamilton in Love, Love, LoveLove, Love, Love (2012). In Mike Barlett’s played Foy played a child of a hippie baby boomer. “It’s the Philip Larkin thing: she really does believe her parents did fuck her up. I hope I’m not like she is when she’s 37." (Pictured, Foy with Victoria Hamilton)

Macbeth (2013). “Why does everyone think she’s so evil? My approach to every character is you essentially want to understand. They always have something they are fighting against. They have lost a baby and that’s the catalyst for everything.”

Wolf Hall (2015). Foy’s Anne Boleyn goes toe to toe with Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis.

The Crown (2016). Queen of all she surveys. Bring on series two.


Overleaf: watch Rose Buck (Jean Marsh) look round Eaton Place

Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain, BBC Two

Clearly, it's a one-horse race to the top for the toffs

Say what you like about the posh – they know their place. Equipped from an early age with a sense of entitlement, they also have access to the oldest and most powerful social network there is: call it what you will, but the old boys' network remains, and you’d be hopelessly naïve to think otherwise. Where would our current prime minister be without it? Tony Parsons, who, as a working-class boy made good, is among a pitifully declining breed, thought he knew: “If David Cameron had gone to a comprehensive school he’d be lucky to be digging ditches,” he spat. That seemed unduly harsh, but after absorbing a few of the stats in last night’s Posh and Posher, it seemed fairly clear what Cameron’s “life chances” – to use old New Labour parlance – would have been, and it certainly wouldn’t have included running the country.

theartsdesk Q&A: Actress Eileen Atkins

Fame has come late for this DBE, as has a role in Upstairs, Downstairs

Eileen Atkins (b 1934) acquired long-overdue fame with her performance in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Her desiccated spinster was the indisputed star turn until death did us part. It’s taken a while. Aside from half a century’s commitment to the classics and new plays, unlike the other more celebrated DBEs she has had a parallel career as a writer. There have been two plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as a screenplay of Mrs Dalloway.

TV Gallery: Downton Abbey

The faces, frocks and frockcoat revisited

Downton Abbey was judged a risk when ITV cleared Sunday nights to accommodate it. It cost a good deal, and harked back to a world and an era which, it might be supposed, a modern television audience would no longer wish to visit. But aside from the pedigree supplied by Julian Fellowes, who had already helped to create one country house in Gosford Park, it had two things going for it: the quality of the cast and the quality of the costumes. On the assumption that its devotees will now be entering a period of mourning, theartsdesk celebrates both in a gallery of images from the set of Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey was judged a risk when ITV cleared Sunday nights to accommodate it. It cost a good deal, and harked back to a world and an era which, it might be supposed, a modern television audience would no longer wish to visit. But aside from the pedigree supplied by Julian Fellowes, who had already helped to create one country house in Gosford Park, it had two things going for it: the quality of the cast and the quality of the costumes. On the assumption that its devotees will now be entering a period of mourning, theartsdesk celebrates both in a gallery of images from the set of Downton Abbey.

Lee Nelson, touring

Chavtastic tea leaf sells his brand of love and benefit cheating nationwide

There’s just the one joke with Lee Nelson. When I caught a short slice of him earlier this year the joke more than filled the available slot. Nelson has since been granted his own show on BBC Three. Now that he’s out on tour, the question arises of how much celebration of chavs, benefit cheats, petty tea-leaves and other totally amoral representatives of Broken Britain you can stomach before the grin starts to get a little fixed.

Cherry Tree Lane

A low-budget British horror which mines middle-class fears

Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full of fearsome but unfulfilled ideas on the terrors waiting at your front door.

The Leopard: The Original Film for Foodies

NEXT WEEK: THE LEOPARD A look back at Luchino Visconti's epic, 50 years after it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes

New digital release of a classic where food is a political language

The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.

The Maid (La Nana)

Chilean film shifts from psychotic to sunny, but Catalina Saavedra impresses throughout

Domestics of varying kinds have always figured prominently in the cinema, from Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Mary Reilly. (Julia Roberts playing the hired help? Uh, don't think so.) But there's rarely been as sullen and indrawn a family employee as the stone-faced Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the eponymous nana, or maid, in the Chilean film of the same name.

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