Imposing modern values on Upstairs, Downstairs
Thursday 30th December 2010, 8:16AM GMT.
Upstairs, Downstairs (BBC1) was filmed a long way from London, writes Peter Rhodes.
The frontage of Eaton Place is actually Clarendon Square in Leamington Spa. We didn’t see a single shot of the house at the end of the street, for good reasons. It may look authentic Regency, like the others, but it’s actually a steel-framed pastiche, built by the local council in the 1960s.
The Upstairs, Downstairs storyline was a bit of a pastiche, too, created by the application of several layers of modern ethics to an historic framework.
We were expected to believe that the domestic servants in a grand house in the 1930s would empathise with a colleague who was a German Jew and be hostile to the chauffeur who joined the fascist Blackshirts.
I suspect in real life it would have been the other way around.
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