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  • Upstairs and Downstaires: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey ed. by James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo
  • Martin Stollery
James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo (Eds) Upstairs and Downstaires: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, 298 pages

This edited collection consists of a foreword by Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History (2008), the editors’ [End Page 57] introduction, and twenty essays organised into three sections: 'Approaches to the costume drama’, ‘The costume drama, history and heritage’, and ‘The costume drama, sexual politics, and fandom’. The collection’s historical focus is primarily upon British television series produced after the late 1960s. Essays in the first section address issues such as historiography, seriality, and music; essays in the second consider topics such as the representation of the Middle Ages, the Second World War, and the merchant navy in selected series; some of the essays in the third section move beyond the predominant focus on textual analysis in the preceding two to concentrate more extensively on fan activity and critical reception.

Many of the individual essays in this collection are valuable contributions, from diverse standpoints, to the study of British television history. For example, Claire Monk draws attention to 1970s productions, which have been overshadowed by debates around the 1980s 'heritage' films and television series that provide a frequent point of reference for the essays in this book. Monk concludes that much of this 1970s work exhibited an “unprecedented thematic interest in class, gender and (hetero)sexual emancipation” (18). In a different register, Julie Anne Taddeo explores an instructive example of fan responses to the representation of a rape perpetrated by their favoured male protagonist, Ross Poldark (played by Robin Ellis) in Poldark (1975–1977). Encompassing issues of adaptation, Taddeo considers how predominant trends in fan definition and interpretation of this event diverge from its retrospective, less forgiving assessment in later Poldark novels (published between 1976 and 2002) by Winston Graham, the author on whose earlier work the series is based.

The selection of British series discussed in Upstairs and Downstairs achieves an effective balance between coverage of contemporary, popular series such as Downton Abbey (2010–2015), perennial favourites now available on DVD box sets, such as Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975), and interesting series that have not been remembered in the same way, such as Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), Danger UXB (1979), and Brass (1983–1984, 1990). With a still from Downton Abbey gracing its cover, and its allusive title, Upstairs and Downstairs therefore combines potential appeal to a wider readership with a commitment to expanding the field of study for television scholars. The diversity of the material covered, however, while in some respects an asset, also prompts some questions regarding the relationships between the various series discussed by the twenty essayists.

‘Costume drama’ is a common sense designation that requires further interrogation. In their introduction, James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo indicate that their volume will primarily focus on “examples that are either newly written [thus potentially open-ended] or based on literary sources that they 'eclipse' or subsume” (xviii). This makes a certain amount of scholarly sense, insofar as British television adaptations of classic literature – Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and the like - have been well served by many other academic publications. Yet it also raises the question of whether this distinction is regularly observed as far as television production, marketing, programming, reviewers' categorisations and audience reception are concerned. Similarly, it would be worth analysing what generic or sub-generic [End Page 58] classifications were initially applied to the diverse series discussed here, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–1959), Upstairs, Downstairs, and Call the Midwife (2012–). What range of other television programmes have they been aligned with when broadcast, repackaged and recirculated across different media, national, historical and subcultural contexts? Elke Weissmann’s concluding essay on the avowedly hybrid Ripper Street (2012-) comes closest to this type of discussion. Future work on British costume drama, and other British television genres, could build upon Jason Mittell’s Genre and Television (2004). Although oriented towards American television, Mittell’s work offers a possible starting point...

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