The Books of My Life: An Historical Geography of Modern Australia

 

I don't recall exactly when this happened, but at some point in my intellectual life I developed an interest in comparing and contrasting human beings, human societies, and human cultures. I suspect that my  increasing interest in comparative studies during my undergraduate years initially derived from my work in Biblical Studies, a discipline that required an attentiveness to broader Near Eastern culture and to broader Mediterranean culture in general. 

My interest in comparative studies didn't end with Biblical Studies, however. It seemed to me that an interest in the study of humanity required that one explore human prehistory and history from a variety of disciplinary standpoints including Anthropology, Sociology, History, Culture Studies, Social Psychology, Biology, Environmental Studies, and beyond. As a consequence of this broadening out of my interests, my intellectual life suddenly changed direction and focus sometime in the 1980s as I was entering graduate school. 

My interest in comparative human studies was certainly one of reasons I was drawn to take a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology, a discipline that attempts to look at humans through the lens of biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological holism or wholeism. My interest in comparative studies was also behind my growing interest in Comparative Historical Sociology and Comparative History. I became particularly interested in the comparative study of English and British settler societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If one wants to understand these societies and cultures, past or present, it seemed obvious to me, one had to compare them with what they were and are most like. If one wanted to understand the history of the United States, for instance, it seemed obvious to me that one needed to compare it to what it was most like, namely the other English and British settler societies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

Because of these broad interests I had a problem finding a disciplinary box that I could fit into and which fit me. Anthropology limited the comparative study of human society and culture to "exotic" traditional societies and cultures and anthropologists, at the time, looked askance at anyone who wanted to study modern core nation societies and cultures. Atheoretical History made doing comparative studies difficult because it parcelled out humans into little fetishised boxes of states and nation-states that novice historians were supposed to specialise in. Sociology, as taught in the US, tended to focus on, in typical naval gazing fashion, on the US. I did not realise for some time that there was a discipline out there in academialand, a discipline that paralls wholistic Anthropology, that would have allowed me to act on my holistic interests had I been aware of it, Geography. If I had been aware of Geography and specifically of its subdisciplines of Historical Geography and Cultural Geography, subdisciplines that were somewhat comparative and attentive to the five factors that affect human groups--economics, culture, demography, and politics-- I woud have taken my postgraduate degree in it.

As someone attracted to the comparative study of English and British settler societies I finally  got around to reading something I should have read years ago, J.M. Powell's seminal An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Resitive Fringe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Powell's book, which is more of a series of related essays on the history of Australian environment, the human adaptation to and transformation of that environment, Australian politics, Australian economic history, and Australian cultural history, than your typical textbook history of Australia, allows anyone with a basic understanding of US and Canadian histories, to compare and contrast these three English and British settler societies across time and across space. 

Reading An Historical Geography of Modern Australia from the vantage point of the history of English and British Settler Societies Studies, one quickly fastens on several fascinating similarities between Australia, Canada, and the United States. There is, for example, the fact that all three are the products of European and more specifically English and European geographical imperialism. There is the common federalism that often plays out in tensions between the federal government and the state and provincial governments and sometimes leads to threats of secession. There is the common notions of manifest destiny with its emphasis on settlement from sea to shining sea even when such settlement was and is geographically problematic. There is the common notion of chosenness,  messianism, and exceptionalism (variations on human ethnocentrism) that all three settler societies shared and share, notions that were and are tied to ideologies of progress and to imperialism and racism. There is the common notion of White supremacy amongst all three societies, an ethnocentric ideology that led to limits on who could immigrate to Australia, Canada, and the US until the post-World War II period. There is the shared manichean and binary ideology of bush or frontier good, cities bad. There is the shared emphasis on Lockean individualism and the yeoman farmer. There is the common notion in all three nations that economic growth is a good, something that aided and abetted the massive transformation of the environment that characterised and still characterises all three nations. There were the common gold rushes. There is the common environmental limits on settlement patterns particularly with respect to Australia and Canada, though when Americans reached the Plains and the deserts it too faced geographical barriers to settlement.  Needless to say, some, many, and perhaps most of these similarities can be traced back to the hearth of the mother country.

There are also, of course, differences between the English and British settler societies of Australia, the US, and Canada. Australia, for instance, as Powell notes, has long been, given down under environmental realities, quite urban. Interestingly, despite being an urban nation almost since its beginnings, Australians celebrated and continue, to some extent, to celebrate the macho rural Aussie of the bush as the epitome of Australianess.

For anyone interested in the history and historical geography of Commonwealth Australia and comparative English and British settler society studies, Powell's book, despite its age, is essential reading. Highly recommended.

Musings on Bliblical Studies, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Classical Studies, Social Theory, and Comparative History

 

When I first matriculated at college I specialised in Biblical Studies. As a consequence of specialising in Biblical Studies I inevitably developed an interest in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and in Classical Civilisation Studies, the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. I developed an interest, in other words, in the Mediterranean World because it was this Mediterranean world that was clearly the near or close context in which the Hebrew and Jewish Tanakh came to be.

It quickly became clear to me, as it did to others of my Biblical and Ancient Studies colleagues at the time, as it clearly did to earlier students of modern Biblical Studies, that to understand and comprehend the Tanakh one had to grasp the cultural, political, demographic, and economic contexts of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world of which it was a part. It quickly became apparent to me, for example, that Ancient Judea, when it was conquered by the Persians in 538 BCE, was impacted extensively by imperial Persian culture and that the nascent Judaism that developed out of the Ancient Hebrew faith around this time was impacted by the Persian Zoroastrian faith, particularly its dualistic monotheism, its manicheaniam, and its apocalypticism. All of these, of course, became important and central parts of the Jewish faith that developed after the Persian conquest of Judea, the Hellenistic conquest of Judea, and the Roman conquest of Judea. One can readily see these Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman influences not only in the Masoretic Tanakh but in the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and in the "scriptures" of other Hellenistic and Roman syncretic religious groups like the Gnostics, the devotees of Mithraism, and the devotees of Early Christianity including Paul of Tarsus.

It wasn't only about the broader Mediterranean contexts of Ancient Israel and later Judea that I learned about. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s I learned, about Alexander the Great's excursions into Persia and India. I learned about the trade routes between the Mediterranean, India, and China including the famous Silk Road. I learned about the trading and cultural centre of Dilmun in parts of what are today Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. I learned, in other words, that there were economic, political, cultural, and demographic contacts between the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and China, and that there was a kind of large-scale geographic area characterised by economic, political, and meaning culture interactions before there was modern and postmodern globalisation, a fact seemingly forgotten by many of the analysts of globalism and the polemists and apologists for globalisation these days.

Eventually, though I don't know exactly when this happened--sometime in the late 1970s and 1980s, I suspect--I learned that there was a period some scholars referred to as the axial age. According to scholars like Karl Jaspers the axial age ran from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE (and perhaps beyond to Platonism and neo-Platonism). The axial age, I learned, was the era of Zoroaster, the age of samsara and karma, the era of the Buddha, the age of Jainism, the era of the Hebrew Nevi'im or Prophets (that sect within early Judaism that appealed to me), the age of Confucius, the era of the mysterious Lao-tse, and the age of the Greek Presocratics, Socrates, Plato (who, so the argument goes, was impacted by Indus Valley meanings systems), and Aristotle. The axial age was an era of cultural interaction, culture change, and cultural hybridity, a hybridity that is reflected in, for example, Mediterranean Mithraism and Early Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. It was also an era that some have seen as proto-modern or postmodern given its diversity, its syncretism, and its critique of animism, animatism, and theism, a kind of proto-secularism.

I didn't stick with Biblical and Mediterranean Studies. After a brief fling with the idea of becoming a rabbi, hardly a realistic profession for a misanthropic introvert like me, I moved beyond Biblical and Ancient Studies. I learned a lot from my engagement with Biblical Studies, however. Biblical Studies forced me to ask historical, ethnological, and sociological questions about the origins of the Hebrew and Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible and those questions, in turn, led me to hermeneutics. I will never forget sitting in James Ackerman's seminar on the Tanakh book of Exodus at Indiana University in Bloomington, and reflecting on the many interpretations of that book that revealed themselves in that class of non-Jewish Jews like me, Reform Jews, high church Christians, and evangelical Christians. I was fascinated by the fact that those brought up in largely the same America could interpret the text of Exodus in such a variety of different ways, interpretations I tied, at the time, to the various religious and non-religious cultures of the participants in this seminar. Biblical hermeneutics, in turn, led me to Max Weber, one of the fathers of hermeneutic social theory, and to social theory in general. I was particularly thrilled by and enthralled with the semiological theory and practise and structuralist theory and practise that were at the height of their influence and impact when I was an undergraduate in university. This, in turn, heightened my interest in cultural anthropology--which I had already done extensive course work in--and in sociology and history. All these, in turn, foregrounded for me the necessity of comparative study and research because, as I learned, you can't understand Ancient Israel and Judea without understanding their historical contexts and you can't understand a British settler society like the United States without comparing and contrasting it with other British settler societies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

I learned a lot of things from all these intellectual experiences. One of the things I learned from all this social theorising and comparative research was that notions such as exceptionalism, be it Jewish, Chinese, American, Canadian, Australian, or Pakeha exceptionalism, are more ideologies, are more the products of culture than they are a representation of "reality". Humans do like to fetishise and universalise after all, something that should be apparent to any of those embedded in the examined life in this brave new digital delusional world.

 

More Musings on How to Do Social Science and History

We can use Hitler's invasion of the USSR to help us understand and comprehend how to do social science and history. First off, we need to note that there are facts: fact Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941. That is not an opinion. It is a fact and no amount of bs can change the fact of when Hitler invaded the USSR.

Social scientists and historians don't stop at the facts. We want to try to understand, for instance why Hitler invaded the USSR. There are five valid empirical strategies by which we can try to answer the question why Hitler invaded the USSR: the economic approach, the approach that emphasises politics, the approach that emphasises culture, the approach that emphasises demography, and the approach that emphasis geography. All five of these empirical interpretive strategies are what Max Weber called ideal types. What he meant by that is that we can isolate them for analytical purposes but in the real world some or all of them interact and impact human life and human society often at the same time. 

So let's use these approaches to ask why Hitler invaded the USSR. Demographic argument: Hitler and the Nazis believed that they were the superior race and that Slavs and others, the Russians are Slavs, were inferior. Hitler, it can be argued, believed the war would be over quickly because Germans and Nordics were the superior race, a superior race that inferior Slavs could not resist. Take note here of the fact that the belief in racial inferiority or superiority is cultural, it is, in other words, a belief. It is not a fact. Beliefs, as such, we can conclude from this, can impact behaviour and culture and demography interacted to help produce Nazi culture and ideology. 

Geographic argument: the USSR was close to Germany and it lay on a plain between the Netherlands and the USSR. This geographical fact, the plain between the Netherlands and Russia, promoted wars in that part of Europe again and again over the centuries. 

Political argument: Germany and the USSR were great powers. As Great powers there were tensions between the two as there always are between great powers. Cf. the tensions between the US and USSR after WWII. Note that here one can add in the cultural tensions, such as the Nazi hatred of Communism, which they regarded as inherently Jewish.

Economic argument: Germany did not have much oil. The USSR did. Hitler, was thus, out to conquer the oil fields near Baku so he could pursue a war effort in which oil was essential.

Cultural argument: As I noted, the Nazis believed that there were superior races, like the Nordic race, and inferior races, like the Slavs and Blacks. No group was more inferior or more deviant in Nazi culture and ideology than Jews. Given this, one can compellingly argue that Hitler invaded the USSR and Eastern Europe because that is where the Jews geographically were and that he attacked the USSR because he intended to bring the final solution to bear on the Jewish question once and for all in the areas of Europe where most of Europes Jews were. And that is why he invaded the USSR despite having a treaty with that nation. 

As I said, there can be multiple factors at work in human social life. Economics is always at work. Politics is generally at work. Demography is often a factor. Geography is often a factor. Culture is always a factor. I tend to emphasise cultural factors in my work while remaining cognisant of the fact the economics, politics, demography, and geography are also generally impactful as well. Why? Because while Hitler's army was being surrounded in the USSR he used the trains to send Jews and others to the death camps. 

By the way, there is one empirical argument that I think has little or no validity, the one which suggests that Hitler was out for world domination. Hitler was actually out to get lebensraum, living space, in Poland. He was out to dominate Europe. And more than anything else he was out to eliminate the Jews, decadents, and the disabled, with the Jews being Nazi enemy number one. This means that the notion that is so prominent in Western demagoguery and discourse these days, the Hitler as James Bond villain out to take over the world ideology, isn't a useful metaphor or analogy to apply to other supposed megalomaniacal Hitler's who have followed in the master's footsteps.

The Books of My Life: Essential Concepts in Sociology

Anthony Giddens's and Philip Sutton's Essential Concepts in Sociology (Cambridge, England: Polity, second edition 2017) is a kind of Keywords--Raymond Williams's famous book on the history of keywords in the humanities and social sciences--for sociology. At the heart of Essentials are 67 "essential concepts" in the academic discipline of Sociology selected by the authors. For each of these 67 key or essential concepts in sociology, the book defines the concept, explores the origins of the concept, delineates the meaning and interpretation of the concept, notes critical points related to the concept, and offers a discussion of the continuing relevance of the concept to academic Sociology (and by extension Political Science, History, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and Social Psychology). 

Each of the 67 concepts Giddens and Sutton explore, concepts like society, culture, sick role, division of labour, sexuality, and stigma, for instance, are, in turn, organised into ten themes, as Giddens and Sutton call them-Thinking Sociologically; Doing Sociology; Environment and Urbanism; Structures of Society; Unequal Life Chances; Relationships and the Life Course; Interaction and Communication; Health Illness and the Body; Crime and Social Control; and Political Sociology. Organising the concepts into themes allows the authors of the book to touch on and succinctly introduce readers to most of the central sub-disciplines of the discipline of Sociology in the twenty-first century.

Though one might quibble with the concepts Giddens and Sutton include or exclude--I found it unfortunate that the book did not include a discussion of civil religion, public religion, or civic religion given its centrality to national identity--Essential Concepts in Sociology does an excellent job of exploring, in a little over 200 pages, most of the central theoretical concepts of the discipline today. In addition to being brief--each essay is three to four pages--and to the point, each essay is written for a general audience making it an excellent guide to the state of the current Sociological art, and a book that can be usefully assigned in general education introductory classes in Sociology. At its heart, after all, Essentials tells us things all of us need to know and understand about the human condition, something everyone, including every college student, needs, in my opinion, to think about at least once in their life.

The Books of My Life: The Social Transformation of American Medicine

Modern social theory often had in the 18th, 19th, and,  early 20th centuries a historical component at its heart. Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies , Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim all attempted to understand the changes in society and culture that they saw taking place as they wrote. They were, after all, living in an era when traditional societies were being replaced bit by bit by modern ones.

Historical sociology may have declined in the era when academic disciplines were being segmented and their labour specialised but historical sociology, even if negatively impacted by specialisation, did not die. Robert Merton wrote about the rise of science. Barrington Moore explored the roles lord and peasant played in the rise of "democratic" and "autocratic" modern societies. Keith Thomas, in his magnificent, Religion and the Decline of Magic--a book that had a massive influence on my intellectual life--explored demagicification in 16th and 17th century England. Even Talcott Parsons, probably the leading social scientist from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, got into the act publishing two volumes late in life in an attempt to provide functionalism with a historical frame. Paul Starr published his sociological history of American medicine in 1982.

Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of An American Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basis, updated edition, 2017) explores the history of American medicine, its doctors, its hospitals, its insurance companies, and the impact of public policy and governmental action had on all three. Starr argues, rightly in my opinion, that a historical methodology is essential to understanding the changing fortunes of the power, authority, and influence of American doctors (decline in Jacksonian America, rise of monopoly power in the Progressive Era thanks to the increasing authority of science; under threat beginning with the New Deal, increasingly corporatised and specialised), the transformation of hospitals (from charities to places of healing, increasing corporatisation), the history of medical insurance (the rise of non-profits, for profits, Medicare and Medicaid), governmental policy toward doctors, hospitals, and the insurance industry, the impact the private economic sector on the American medical system, and the interrelationships between all of these that gave rise and helped to create and bring about changes to the American medical system economically, politically, culturally, geographically, and demographically.

When Starr's book was first published University of Wisconsin historian of science and medicine Ronald Numbers said that it was the book that those interested in the history of American medicine needed to read. Thirty-seven years it still is. Starr's book shows quite clearly that a historical approach is necessary to understanding the American medical system. He also shows that a social theoretical approach is also necessary to an understanding of how the American health system works. Very highly recommended to those interested in how American medicine and the satellites that surround it became what they are today. It is a pity that those who most need to read Starr's book won't since they prefer the ideologically and politically correct myths they parrot to reality. What also is not likely to change is the American care cycle of the recent past, a cycle in which the American health care system lurches from crisis to crisis with bandaids being put on its many sores by the powers that be, bandaids, which, in the final analysis, do little to solve or salve the long term disease at the heart of the American health care system.

The Books of My Life: Seinfeld

I didn't watch much television in the early and mid-1990s. I didn't have a telly until 1991 while between 1993 and 1995 I was travelling and hiking my way across the Canadian and American Wests with my then friend Lea Danielsen. As a result I didn't see Seinfeld when it debuted on NBC in 1990 and I didn't watch Seinfeld when it was at its height of popularity as one of the shows that was part of NBC's Thursday night "Must See TV", shows that helped make NBC America's top network for a time, from 1992 to 1998. In fact, I didn't, in fact, watch Seinfeld until it was in reruns in the mid-1990s.

I liked Seinfeld. I still do. I also enjoyed reading Nicholas Mirzoeff's critical study of Seinfeld (Seinfeld, BFI TV Classics series, London: BFI, 2007. Though Mirzoeff's book is not grounded in interviews with the shows creators--Mirzoeff says it makes one less critical of a text, which is a fair cop I suppose--and is like so much television, film, and literary criticism today, text centred. Still Mirzoeff has a lot of interesting things to say about Seinfeld.

Mirzoeff, drawing on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Raymond Williams concept of flow, Aristotle's theory of comedy, Sigmund Freud's theory of displacement, Gustav Faubert's realism, Harold Pinter's theatre of the everyday, and the history of Jewish comedy, argues that Seinfeld is visually traditional and verbally innovative, that Seinfeld was meant to make money through advertising revenue for NBC, that Seinfeld is a comedy of manners, a comedy of social rules and social behaviour, a comedy of relationships, a comedy of the absurdities of everyday life, a comedy of spite, rather than a romantic comedy like most other American situation comedies, and a comedy heavily influenced by vaudeville and the Yiddish theatre that is focused around "four adolescent infants" trying to figure out the social rules of everyday life in the era of the Oslo Accords. This "too Jewish" comedy reflects, Mirzoeff asserts, the Jewish movement into the White American mainstream beginning in the 1950s and a late twentieth century concern about masculinity and gender. It depends for its comedy, Mirzoeff maintains, on its audience getting the get, as he calls it, involves the audience, in other words, filling in the social and cultural intertextuality or references.

One of the things I thought about as I was reading Mirzoeff's book was the current state of television and film theory. As some of you may know television and film theory has been grounded, at least in part, in Freudian theory and Lacan's reworking of Freudian theory, thanks to the notion quite common in academia that television and films are akin to a dream that can be decoded by the in the know analysand. I have never, however, found Freudian theory and its Lacanian variant particularly compelling and I have never believed that television and film are akin to a dream. I think it more useful to take a more sociological approach to television and cinema than a psychoanalytic one. It is obvious, to me anyway, that, sociologically speaking, all societies, their culture, their forms of socialisation, of which the media is one, are socially and culturally constructed and, as such, reflect the social and cultural ideologies, the civil religion or the myths, at the heart of that society and culture. It is obvious to me that these ideologies, this civil religion, and these myths have been fetishised by specific societies and cultures. It is thus not surprising that the media, including television, mirrors these societies and cultures and, on occasion, the fractions--class, gender, ethnic--within those societies and cultures. We need less Freud or Lacan in the exploration of television and more Marx and Weber and their heirs to help us understand the nature and function of television.

As I said, I enjoyed Mirzoeff's book and recommend it to intellectuals and scholars interested in American television and American situation comedy. I did have one historical quibbles with the book. Historically speaking it helps, I think, to put Seinfeld within the context of earlier "too Jewish" television shows like Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950-1954) and The Dick van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961-1966, which was created by an alumni of Your Show of Shows. The Dick van Dyke Show, in particular, had elements of the comedy of relationships, the comedy of manners, the comedy of the absurdities of everyday life, and the workplace comedy which it shared with Seinfeld and I wish Mirzoeff had explored these precedents more.

My Sojourn Among the Wobblies

Before I electronically entered the land of the Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) tribe I had been told by previous sojourners and observers who knew of my interest in the social and cultural construction of culture and ideology that the Wobblies had a very interesting ideological topography. According to these researchers the Wobblies, like most other humans before them and likely most other humans after them, divide up the world into two spheres: the sacred and the profane. In the category of the sacred is, for members of the contemporary Wobbly tribe, the man Wobblies seem to think of as kind of a prophet, Karl Marx, and the works of "the prophet", which the Wobblies regard as infallible sacred scripture. In the category of the profane is anyone who criticises, validly or not, the prophet, the sacred works of the prophet, and that key symbol of contemporary Wobbly culture, the utopian belief that "the working class"--ironically most contemporary Wobblies seem to be middle class intellectuals--is the essence of all that is good and pure in a profane world dominated and run by capitalist pigs and their running dog lackeys, a belief symbolised succinctly and pithily by the graphic art poster above with its radiant future brought to you by the Wobblies motif. Critics of Wobbly sacred culture are, researchers report, regarded by the Wobbly tribe as heretics and disbelievers and treated as such by the Wobblies.

Recently, a number of researchers have reported that a new category of profane has begun to emerge among current members of the Wobbly tribe, namely the belief that anyone who writes more than a few paragraphs and who uses words like fetishisation or social and cultural construction in their electronic posts is profaning the sacred culture of the Wobblies, a culture, of course, which Wobblies, have fetishised. What is fascinating about this conception of the profane among contemporary Wobblies is that it has become apparent among members of the tribe despite the fact that the works of their prophet run to several thousand pages and are littered with words like fetishisation, the labour theory of value and other technical philosophical and economic "jargon". Most researchers chalk the rise of this novel conception of the profane among recent Wobblies up to the rise of the new digital media and its negative impact on the attention spans of those who use electronic media, something that shows, contrary to Wobbly ideology, that culture is sometimes base.

What I can report at this point in my research is that my research thus far confirms the reports of previous observers. The Wobblies I encountered do have very definite notions of what is sacred and what is profane, do treat as heretics those who violate Wobbly sacred taboos, do inquisit those who violate Wobbly sacred taboos, and do react negatively to electronic posts they regard as too long and too full of multi-syllabic words. I can also report that I learned a few other things during my ethnographic sojourn among the Wobbly faithful. The posts they criticise for being too long and too verbose, in my experience, are only those posts they regard as profaning their holy of holies, their sacred prophet and his sacred works. This intellectual anti-intellectualism of the Wobblies I encountered may, in part, be a product of the comprehension, patience, and concentration problems wrought by the rise of new digital media with their cult of pithiness. It is also, if not more, the product of an ideological correctness grounded in the sense that they, the Wobblies, have a monopoly on truth. That's fetishisation. I learned that the official Wobby commitment to direct democracy is only skin deep. When the Board at the "coop" at which the Wobblies work and shop appointed someone to the Board who finished sixth in a direct membership election--three were elected--the Wobblies supported the Board action justifying the means by reference to the ends, the lawyer appointed was more union friendly and, as a result, more friendly to the Wobbly union they are trying to expand at the Coop. Ironically, a Board member who is opposed to unionisation in putatively cooperative settings also justified the means--appointing a lawyer who finished behind two others--by the end--it was expedient. Those Wobblies sure do wobble. All of this, by the way, makes the Wobblies I met online rather typical examples of the human species, particularly the bourgeois human species..

Author's note: There is a bit of the Nacirema tongue in cheek in this blog post. There are several serious points being made in it as well, I hope.

Mucking About in the Recesses of Theoretical Memory...

One of the most treasured moments in my life were those days when I frequented one of downtown Athens, Ohio's 20 plus pubs with my Socialist Worker Party friend Jake and a group of political science and sociology students from Ohio University in the 1980s to explore, discuss, and debate social theory, Marxist and beyond, to try to figure out the world we lived in. Another was the years I spent hiking the American and Canadian West with another one time friend but that is another story.

What I enjoyed most about these experiences, apart from the intellectual stimulation, was that they were not dogmatic. While Jake was a Socialist Worker he was not a fundamentalist Marxist. Jake did not, or at least this was my impression, need to believe that every jot and tittle that Marx wrote was infallible and true. In these gatherings we were able to talk about and critique a variety of social theories civilly and respectfully and, of course, enjoy a beer or three at the same time.

I have been studying social theory, including Marxism, history, religion, and the social sciences for forty years. I have taken much from Marx particularly his emphasis on economics and his discussion of the fetishisation of the commodities if in its broadened social constructionist form. I have also borrowed from Weber, who I still find the most compelling of the great social theorists though I do not regard him as infallible. I have taken much from Lukacs (a student of Weber), Gramsci, the Frankfurt School (who were responding to Weber), Keith Thomas, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, Foucault (who expanded on Weber), Baudrillard, Geertz, Victor Turner and a multitude of others. I have long sought to understand the world we live in and all of these theorists have helped me do just that. I have had the opportunity to learn not only from friends and theorists but from a handful of wonderful teachers.

Because of all this I think that I, because I recognise that social theory like life itself, is dynamic and must attempt to come to grips with a world in flux, have a better understanding of a world that has changed dramatically since the mid-19th century, the world Marx was writing about. Some of what Marx said, of course, is still instructive and helpful. Some of what he wrote has been proven wrong, the labour theory of value which he took from Ricardo, for instance. All of what I have taken from these host of theorists has helped me understand that we now live in a world, a postmodern and postindustrial world, where consumer capitalism and service sector capitalism, are dominant. They have helped me understand that we now live in a world where digital media bread and circuses anaesthetise much of the population and the old media anaesthetise most of the rest.

Historical changes require, in my opinion, a broader social theory, which, while it recognises the centrality of economics, requires and demands a more subtle and nuanced notion of base and superstructure. Marx. of course, hinted at a more subtle and nuanced view of base and superstructure on several occasions, something many of his more fundamentalist dogmatic disciples could learn from. Weber, who like Marx argues for the centrality of economics, offers a more nuanced view of culture, politics, and geography that have been very helpful to me in comprehending both the modern and postmodern worlds I have and continue to live in. I am so glad that social theory in the service of understanding has been a significant part of my intellectual life. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Even Idiots? Respect and Intellectual Talk...

I love the British comedy/drama Outnumbered a lot. In one scene in the show, part of which is improvised, young daughter Ramona, when her parents in culturally correct fashion say all views should be respected, asks them even the views of idiots? The answer, of course, to Ramona's question is no. From the mouth of babes...

The climate deniers, who are a very small minority in the scientific community, are like the automobile companies and cigarette companies of the past. Automobile companies said putting seat belts in cars would be expensive and not really effective. Cigarette company bureaucrats and their paid shills claimed cigarettes hadn't been proved to be harmful to the smokers or second hand smokers heath. Of course, both knew what they were saying was patented bullshit or gobshite.

Many who deny climate change aren't making an educated empirical analysis of the data. Most are simply parroting the crap they hear from right wing demagogues in the media or in person. When one looks at the data it is clear the planet has warmed significantly since the industrial revolutions. Temperatures have regularly increased. Glaciers have retreated. Ice is melting in the North. Islands are disappearing bit by bit. When one looks at the data it is clear humans have contributed to climate change by their actions--things related to industrial revolutions and capitalism--to this state of affairs. Anyone who denies this reality is blind, ignorant, or has an ideological reason to do so. No one has to respect the idiocies that come out of the mouths of these morons anymore than one has to respect the views of misogynists, bullies, or flat earthers.

Systematic and Analytical Thinking is Not the Best Way to Travel

Yesterday at Honest Weight I was reminded yet again that most humans, even humans with a degree of intellectual capabilities, just can't think.

There are two major problems that underlie the "intellectual" abilities of so many out there in Americaland. First, fetishisation. Far too many confuse how they feel and think with how others feel and think. Just because you feel that the Democrats that the Democrats aren't "leftist" enough doesn't mean that this is how voters in North Carolina or Louisiana felt when they went to the polls on the fourth of November 2014. Just because you get all soap opera emotional doesn't mean that everyone else gets soap opera emotional.

Another major problem with contemporary intellectuals is the tendency for many to go all postmodern on human behaviour. Yes, the social and cultural construction of reality is a factor in how many humans see the world and human behavior in it. That doesn't mean, however, that there is no reality out there, that global warming, for instance is an ideological fiction. It isn't. What it does mean is that even "thinking" humans are rarely able to think critically about the ideologies they reproduce in intellectual discourse.

A third problem is the inability of may to cite specific empirical evidence for their claims. If you are going to argue or suggest that all science is the product of economic factors such as monetary political support you need to show how Albert Einstein's theory of relativity or that Nate Silver's model of electoral analysis is the product where they get their money from. Vast and vague generalisations simply won't cut mustard.

While it is true that many "intellectuals" cannot escape the fetishisistic and reality is a fiction cages their minds of trapped in, there is a way that we humans can achieve a more "objective" grasp of the universe and human action within that universe: analytical and systematic reasoning that is dispassionate (more analytical and systematic than emotion laden). It is a pity that most humans, even some of those who do use their minds in more systematic and analytical way, can't achieve this empirical path to intellectual understanding. C'est la vie.

Was the Holocaust Unique? Memories of a Blue Book Long Ago...

Long long ago in an undergraduate galaxy far far away I wrote a blue book on the uniqueness of the Holocaust for my Holocaust class with Dr. Todd Endelman sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. While I can't remember everything that I wrote for my examination, I can recall, in outline form, what my argument was.

If memory serves I began my exploration of the question Dr. Endelman posed to the class, was the Holocaust unique, by thinking first about murder itself since the Holocaust was clearly a species of murder. Instead of arguing that murder could be defined as a series of discreet acts--for example, murder, mass murder, genocide--I argued that murder had to be conceptualised as a continuum with the murder of one person on the right end of the continuum and genocide on the continuum's left side.

Redefining murder in this way, I next argued that the Holocaust could not be seen as unique from other instances of murder and from other instances of genocide. The Holocaust may have been genocide that resulted in the deaths of some six million European Jews, 60% of the Jewish population of Europe, the highest percentage of a people or a group genocided by genociders, but it was still a genocide. Genocide too, just like murder, I argued, had to be conceptualised as a continuum within a continuum with the Holocaust on the far left end of the genocide spectrum and other genocides lying at other points along the right part of the continuum line. The Cambodian genocide, for instance, saw 25% of the Cambodian population, defined as "westerners" exterminated.

In the end my point was that murder was murder and that no form of murder was unique, just qualitatively, continuumly, different. All murder, by and large, I argued, was and is, in some way, shape, or form, a violation of human rights.

By the way, the paper I wrote for my Holocaust class wasn't as well received as my blue book essay. In my paper I tried to apply Erving Goffman's notion of total institution to the ghettos created by the Nazis to help turn Jews into the very stereotypes and caricatures they had of Jews. Despite the unconvincing nature of the paper I would still maintain that Jewish ghettos were examples of Goffman's total institutions.

Academia as Provincial...

Yesterday I was talking to a female academic in the humanities on the subject of women's and feminist history. When I mentioned British feminism and the Pankhurst's she said she had never heard of the Pankhurst's. She was, she said, not a specialist in British Studies.

For me this statement and the attitude that underlies it are the very essence of what is wrong with academia as opposed to the intellectual life, a life that strives to constantly learn something new. Academics far too often divide things up into the silly little boxes they call disciplines and subdivide these silly little boxes into ever tinier silly little boxes they call subdisciplines.

The problem with such silly little boxes is that they undermine a more accurate understanding of humans and human life, something that should be one of the things central to an examined life. The Pankhurst's may have been British or English but they were also central to a feminist movement that crossed the silly little boundaries socially and culturally constructed and then fetishised by academe be these disciplinary or nationalist. The suffragist movement in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond interacted with each other and influenced each other and national feminisms cannot be understood without understanding the transnational nature of nineteenth and twentieth century feminism. Beyond this it seems to me that everyone with an active mind should seek to understand the history of an important social and cultural movement that has changed the world.

And people wonder why I have little patience with and little respect for academia, the most opiated of the bourgeoisie I have encountered. Another glass of wine Reg?

Thesis...Antithesis...Death to the Infidel...

A poster on Facebook recently asked "Do you A Enjoy our political debates B Enjoy my personal stories C Enjoy my attempts at humor D Enjoy my sports stories E Like a good variety. F Wish I would give it a rest and quit clogging up your Facebook pages."

The interesting thing about discussions is that they are by and large not discussions. Those who take part in discussions who see governments as the essence of evil in the universe, for example, are not engaging in discussions grounded in empirical evidence or facts. They are simply expressing their ideological beliefs in dogmatic statements that are similar to Christian catechisms of the past and present. Like religious dogmatists they expect you to agree with them. It is the old tried and unfortunately true I am OK if you want to be OK you must believe like me ideological stratagem.

Now I want to add another wrinkle to this discussion of political and economic discussions. Many on the right--political, religious, economic--are more inquisitors than discussants. They believe that only they are "real Americans" and that anyone who disagrees with them are trying to undermine the American way of life (see the sadly looney response of many on the right to Obama's presidency for empirical proof of this statement). All of this points up the need for what Dennis Potter calls heterodoxy.

Facts are facts even if we recognise that the world we humans have created is socially and culturally constructed. Napoleon did invade Russia in 1812. Why he did and the various viable interpretations (hermeneutics) of why Napoleon invaded (economic, political, cultural, geographic, demographic) Russia point up the need for a realisation that facts are multiply interpretable and that a variety of interpretations may be viable at one and the same time. And, as Jarvis Paisley notes, we all need to respect and listen to these various viable and valid interpretations. But we should never forget that opinions worth respecting have to be valid and viable interpretations first.

Not So New Moods for Libertarian Not So Moderns...

One has to appreciate, at least on some level, those debating evolution and libertarianism on Facebook without any reference to historical reality. Evolution first. The problem with naïve pop Darwinism, pop Social Darwinism, and pop Sociobiology is its general lack of attention to something Darwin noted was central to human evolution, the environment. Genes plus the broad environment equal human evolution. Given this we could and should note and explore how human transformations of the environment, for instance, have impacted evolution including human evolution. I give you cigarettes and global warming.

Second, libertarianism. Much of the discussion of libertarianism on Facebook and beyond isn't--and this is the problem--about history and empirical reality. Libertarians, or at least many libertarians, seem to think that governments are inherently evil and that the ugliness they see in government should be ugliness in everyone else's eyes (libertarianism as fundamentalism). Now don't get me wrong. I don't mind discussing morality and ethics but I do mind discussing morality and ethics in an ahistorical vacuum and in a way that ignores the variability of interpretations (ugliness is in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder).

When we look at real history we can clearly see that governments have been contradictory. Governments have created national economies, brought jobs, helped fight poverty, built dams to bring water to citizens, helped build cities, built roadways, created national parks, educated citizens, fought wars, surveilled its citizens, helped exacerbate inequality, helped transform the environment, lied, and propagandised, all things that we can read and have read as variably good or bad depending on what an eye of the beholder values.

Governments aren't the only things that are contradictory in the social and cultural eyes of beholders or in reality. Corporations too are contradictory. Some beholders might and would see the concentration (monopolies, cartels) modern economic bureaucracies bring (inequality, environmental transformations, using their power and money to gain advantages, sense of specialness), an empirical fact, of course, as good, others as bad. Economic corporations, in other words, are contradictory just like governments.

That many libertarians ignore the fact that government behaviour is just like, to chose one example, the behaviour of corporations (reality) and condemn the behaviour of one and not the others (morality) is enough for me to dismiss them as demagogues, as running dog shills for their economic masters voices, and, as such, irrelevant to any real discussion of the relevant issues. In the end the ideologies on which pop libertarians ground their notions of humans, human prehistory and history, human society, human and culture are no more historically real than Peter Pan. This means that like most economic theory libertarianism is the equivalent of vacuum packed manichean dogma and will be until it addresses the real facts of history. That, libertarianism doesn't seem able to do.

Kelley's Zeros: Musings on the American Libertarian Mind...

We now live in a bizarre surreal world, a bizarre surreal world where American history can be wiped out with the stroke of a few keys on a computer, cell phone, or pad keyboard much like how many of the old Bolsheviks were literally scratched out of history after they had fallen out of Stalin's graces in the USSR.

Recently I came across a number of statements on Facebook, statements stimulated by the rather bizarre standoff between one Cliven Bundy, a Nevada Mormon rancher who owes the US government over a million dollars in grazing rights fees that go back some twenty years but who, not surprisingly, doesn't want to pay it, which reflect this right wing tendency to ignore American history when it conflicts with their ideologically driven socially and culturally constructed reality. A classic case of cognitive dissonance. A post I saw recently which arose out of the debates over l'affaire Bundy on Facebook and which reflects this right wing tendency to ahistoricism is this one. According to poster David Kelley "[t]here is no such thing as "the public" nor "public lands". Land can only legitimately be claimed as property by those who homesteaded it or purchased it from someone who did. In no case does the federal government have a legitimate claim to this land (except that Harry Reid is trying to confiscate if for a Chinese solar firm). I am not a constitutionalist, but even so, Article 1, Section 8 makes it clear that there is no legitimate legal claim of the federal government to this land. No, no legal claim and no moral claim. Seems Bundy has the high ground here. What is lacking is superior fire power for him to defend his rights against an invading army."

Mr. Kelley's views, of course, aren't peculiar to Mr. Kelley. Most of them are shared by right libertarians and many on the right in general as Mr. Kelley acknowledges in a later post when he notes that he shares many of these views with a right wing "philosopher" named Larry Barnhart. Mr. Kelley, in other words, has clearly been socialised into public cultural forms. The prevalence of these common right wing notions are unfortunate because most of the claims they contain are simply empirically false as is their method, namely a tendency to make assertions which are not backed up with any empirical evidence whatsoever, a method also practised with perfect imperfection by fundamentalists of all stripes.

The reason why Mr. Kelley's, Mr. Barnhart's, and others who share their views claims are false and why the United States government owns so much territory in the American West, 84.5% of Nevada, 69.1% of Alaska, 57.5% of Utah, for example, is, simple. It is because all of the what are now states in the West were once territories "owned" by the US federal government. The American West, putting aside the fact that it was once home to a number of indigenous groups and that it was colonised by Westerners in the 19th and 20th centuries, was acquired by the United States government via the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, via the Mexican-US war of 1846 through 1848, via the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 and 1854, via Seward's purchase of Alaska in 1867, and via the Indian Wars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. After acquiring territory in the West the US government, as it did earlier when, thanks to Thomas Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784 and the the Ordinances of 1785, and 1787, stimulated the settlement and economic development of the "Old Northwest" of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota, sold land to settlers (a type of government welfare if you will) and private settlement companies who often bought the land cheap and sold it to settlers at a higher price making profits in the process on the back of the settlers (a type of government welfare for the rich and powerful) stimulating, in the process, the settlement and economic development of the Great Plains and the West. The US government also sold land to railroad companies allowing them, over time, to link the US together unifying, for the first time, the United States and creating, for the first time in US history, a unified US economy. The US government as creator of economic growth and of jobs. Lands that were not sold after these public sales remained in government hands. Some of this land, land like that at Yellowstone, which was deemed "useless" by those who explored and surveyed it because it was seen as "unproductive", it couldn't, in other words, be ranched or farmed, eventually remained public lands. The federal government acquired marginal lands in the Great Plains during the New Deal era when over-farming and over-ranching led to the ravages of the Dust Bowl. The federal government acquired further lands in the West through land given to it as a gift as when John D. Rockefeller Jnr. purchased lands around Jackson Hole, Wyoming and gave them to the federal government for a national park, Grand Teton National Park. The wealthy Rockefeller's had a sense of citizenship and noblesse oblige that seems to be sadly lacking in the oligarchs of today, like the libertarian Koch's and Adelson's, who seem to use their money for little other than their personal financial benefit and glory. Federal government lands in the West, by the way, serve many purposes and functions including military (military bases), tourist (national parks and national monuments that are visited by millions of Americans annually), bringing water and electricity to the West (Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and the Grand Coulee Dam along the Columbia, all of which brought urban growth and economic development, including increased agricultural production, to the West), for grazing, for logging, and for oil extraction (Bureau of Land Management lands which operate or are supposed to operate on conservation principles set in place by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot) amongst them.

This claim that there is no such things as public lands is thus patently false. Mr. Kelley's claim is an ideologically driven one rather than an empirical one as Mr. Kelley himself makes clear when he uses a value laden term, "legitimate" to justify his positions. Historically speaking libertarian ideologies have been built on the foundation of ahistorical notions of private property. Apologetics and polemics over "private property" became prominent during the era when the West was transitioning from traditional to modern forms. This transition, which led to the development of the modern world, didn't, by the way, create "public" property for the first time in human history. Monarchs, who arose in the Ancient Near East and in China parallel with the rise of agriculture, used their power and their control of a military, to acquire wealth by mandating that their subjects give a portion of their produce and their labour to them and acquired their own land, land that can be said to be public since they were the government. Monarchs also, of course, supported religious institutions which had their own public property such as temples, religious institutions which demanded goods and sacrifices and sometimes pilgrimages from their subjects, their publics, because they legitimated and justified the authority and power of monarchs.

In the Western world monarchs, of course, often, in some places, fought battles, hot and cold, with others of wealth, a wealth also grounded in the control of land, aristocrats. Aristocratic politics, economics, and culture, often mimicked, if generally on a smaller scale, that of the monarchs. Those who lived on aristocratic land, serfs, owed goods and labour to aristocrats, a "reality" that was justified and legitimised by religious ideologies. The land the serfs farmed was often communally or publicly organised.

The rise of the modern world, which was accompanied by the rise of middle classes all around the Western World and the decline of communal public property thanks to enclosures, led inevitably to new philosophical justifications for a changed state of affairs. One of the most prominent was that of John Locke. Locke argued that private property was created when humans mixed their labour with the land. Locke, in other words, provided a justification and legitimation for those who owned property. Locke also provided, if perhaps unintentionally, a justification and legitimation for those taking land from indigenous peoples all around the world on the basis of the argument that those they were taking land from, the aboriginals in various places who generally held communal notions of land, weren't using their land "productively", weren't, in other words, farming their land like Westerners. Locke's notions about the origins of private property, by the way, are inherently ahistorical because, as we know from archaeological studies of early humans and ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers, the earliest form of human social organisation, the earliest humans had communal notions of land ownership even if this communalism was soon cross-cut by tribal notions of identity and territoriality.

By the way, what many libertarians forget is that the Locke on whom they draw whether consciously or unconsciously, also argued, in both religious and secular terms, that property, along with liberty and life, were "inalienable". Property, in other words, a property created by the labour of specific individuals, could not be transferred from one person to another since private property was created by the labour of specific individuals interacting with the land and who, as a result, could not alienate it. This, of course, would make the transfer of property, usually from the less wealthy to the more wealthy since the rise of "civilisation", a central component of mass capitalism, unacceptable. By the way, Karl Marx made a similar argument about the creation of property in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Thomas Jefferson, of course, borrowed Locke's formulation enshrining it within the American "Declaration of Independence" in a somewhat changed trinitarian formulation: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Historical amnesia, of course, is not the monopoly of Messrs Kelley and Barnhart or of libertarians in general. It has become increasingly and especially prominent within a Republican Party that has changed dramatically since its origins. What was once called the radical right by historians and political scientists, has, since the rise to prominence of the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, increasingly become Republican mainstream. And unfortunately, such anti-empirical intellectualism has negative consequences whether it comes in the form of denying historical reality or denying the empirical reality of climate change all in the, if you dig deep enough into right wing polemics and apologetics, name of increasing the wealth and power of the one percent.

Theoretical and Methodological Note: There is a difference between is and ought, two things many libertarians confuse. There are and have been public lands. That is a descriptive, empirical, and historical fact. Whether there ought to be public lands is a different and more philosophical, theological, abstract, and normative issue that can be debated.

Full Disclosure Statement: Once upon a time I lived in the American Southwest, specifically Texas, and in the American West, specifically in Utah. In the 1990s I visited many of the national parks of the American and Canadian Rockies, most of the national monuments of the American West, and many of the state parks of the American and Canadian Wests. The American West, of course, is the area of the United States that has most benefited from American government welfare in the form of things like reservoirs, national parks and monuments, interstate highways, and military bases. All of these have brought people, jobs, and money into the US West helping to make it, in the process, a place where people can live and work. It has also helped make the American West one of the most urban regions of the United States. This makes it rather ironic that many in the West, an area largely made habitable because of American government actions, have imagined themselves as the standard bearers of that good old time American "religion" of I did it myself individualism. LOL.

A Dragnety Disclaimer: I am going to agree with Mr. Kelley on one thing, there is no such thing as a "public" cyberspace. This blog is thus not to be construed as something which is "public" since there is no such thing as a "public" at least according to Mr. Kelley.

Further Viewing:
For an excellent and interesting exploration of Enlightenment thought including that of Locke and the libertarians see Michael Sandmel's superb PBS television programme, Justice. Historical reality welcomely intrudes on Sandmel's Harvard course on occasion. Locke's thought, by the way, is at the heart of episode four.

For an exploration of what a true lone individualist would look and be like without social and cultural socialisation and enculturation (rather than the mythical ideological ones imagined by philosophers like Thomas Hobbes) see François Truffaut's wonderful 1970 film L'enfant sauvage/The Wild Child, a film based on the real life story of Victor of Aveyron, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, in the early 19th century.

Time Passages: From Upstairs Downtstairs to Downton Abbey

When Downton Abbey first appeared on British television screens on 26 September 2010 and American TV screens on 9 January 2011 many critics immediately compared it to that popular upstairs downstairs drama that preceded it, Upstairs Downstairs.[1] Mark Lawson writing in the Guardian noted that Downton looked to him like a contemporary descendent of Upstairs Downstairs. David Breaker writing in the Spectator argued that Downton Abbey "stole" not only from Upstairs Downstairs but also from Mrs. Miniver (Wyler, 1941) and Little Women (presumably he means Alcott’s 1868 book but it is not clear). Mary McNamara writing in the Los Angeles Times described Downton Abbey as "this generations Upstairs Downstairs in both theme and stature”. Rob Owen writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that Downton recalls Upstairs Downstairs. Alessandra Stanley writing in the New York Times described Downton as a hybrid "Remains of the Gosford/Upstairs/Brideshead Revisited Park" and a remake of Upstairs Downstairs. Gosford Park (Altman, 2000), which was written by Downton creator Julian Fellowes and was once described to Jean Marsh, one of the creators of Upstairs Downstairs, who was asked to write the script for that film at one point, as a cross between Upstairs Downstairs and Agatha Christie. Historian Simon Schama writing in Newsweek wrote that the main plot lines of Downton Abbey had been anticipated some forty years before in Upstairs Downstairs.[2]

The similarities between the two shows didn't go unnoticed in the world of Upstairs Downstairs either. Upstairs co-creator Jean Marsh told BBC 1's The One Show that Downton Abbey was a thinly disguised “facsimile” of Upstairs Downstairs. Jean Marsh’s take on Downton Abbey as a copy of Upstairs Downstairs may not simply have been a question of historical influence. It may have had something to do television competition since the BBC was in the process of reviving Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey was receiving all the critical and viewer attention Marsh and the BBC presumably hoped the new Up Down would receive.[3]

Upstairs Downstairs, which ran on British commercial network ITV from 1971 to 1975, [4] was the brainchild of actors Jean Marsh, who would go on to play Rose the downstairs parlour or house maid in the show, and Eileen Atkins, who was supposed to play the downstairs cook but was unable to because of other commitments. The show became, to the surprise of many of those involved with it including many at London Weekend Television (LWT), the ITV franchise holder for Greater London and the Home Counties that commissioned the show, and John Whitney’s and John Hawksworth’s Sagitta Productions company, the production company that produced the show, not only a hit in the United Kingdom, where it garnered some 15 million viewers in its second week on the air in the 10:15 pm Sunday graveyard shift, but also in the United States, where it was broadcast on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, and in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Somewhere between 300 million to one billion viewers tuned in to the show worldwide in its heyday in the 1970s making Upstairs Downstairs one of the most popular shows in the world at the time.[5]

Upstairs Downstairs was not only a popular success it was also a success within the entertainment industry. By 1977 he show had garnered 26 British and international awards including BAFTA awards for Best Drama in 1972 and 1974 and Emmy awards for Outstanding Drama Series in 1974, 1975, and 1977. Perhaps most importantly the programme brought around £1 million pounds to struggling London Weekend Television thanks, in large part, to sales of the show to some 70 countries worldwide.[6]

Beyond the world of television Upstairs Downstairs spawned novelisations (as did the Upstairs Downstairs spin off Thomas and Sarah) by Up Down producer John Hawksworth, Mollie Hardwick, and Michael Hardwick, fictional books about series characters Rose, Mr. Hudson, Sarah, Mrs. Bridges, Richard Bellamy, and the Bellamy's in general, a cookbook, Mrs. Bridges Upstairs, Downstairs Cookery Book written by Adrian Bailey (1974), and a book on the historical and sociological background of the series written by Mollie Hardwick, The World of Upstairs, Downstairs (1976). It also spawned a number of television clones including the short lived Beacon Hill (1975) on the US CBS network, Upstairs Downstairs producer John Hawksworth's The Duchess of Duke Street (BBC, 1976-1977), Upstairs's story editor’s Alfred Shaughnessy’s The Cedar Tree (ATV/ITV, 1976-1979), the Up Down spin-off Thomas and Sarah (LWT/ITV, 1979), The Grand (ITV, 1997-1998), and, more recently, Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey is the creation of British actor, writer, and director Julian Fellowes. Downton was developed by Carnival Films and premiered on the same network Upstairs Downstairs had been broadcast on in the 1970’s, ITV. In the United States Downton was broadcast on, Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, the same franchise Up Down had been broadcast on almost forty years before.

Like Upstairs Downstairs, Downton has proved to be a popular success around the globe. Downton Abbey is shown in over 200 national markets around the world. In the UK the series attracted some nine to twelve million viewers per episode. In the US the first episode of the second series was watched by more than four million viewers, up 18% from the first series, while the premiere of the third series was watched by 7.9 million. In Australia, where Downton is broadcast on Seven, the series attracted a “mammoth audience” of almost two million viewers. In New Zealand, where it is broadcast on Prime TV, the Downton premiere garnered almost 340,000 viewers. Globally close to 120 million viewers are estimated to have tuned into Downton Abbey.[7]

Like Upstairs Downstairs before it Downton Abbey has also proven to be a critical success within the television industry. Downton’s first series was awarded three BAFTA’s, four Emmy’s, and two Golden Globes. Its second series was nominated for sixteen Emmy’s, winning one. Like Upstairs Downstairs Downton Abbey has become something of a cultural phenomenon beyond the television screen stimulating the publication of a book, The World of Downton Abbey authored by creator Fellowes’s niece Jessica, leading American bookstores to offer book suggestions to its customers on Edwardian social and cultural life and World War I, stimulated viewers to hold Downton themed viewer parties, moved PBS to offer Downton themed jewellry, and stimulated much discussion on Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere.[8]

Interest in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey within the ivy halls of the academy, however, has trailed far behind that of institutional and popular interest. Despite Upstairs Downstairs being the first upstairs downstairs television show in television history, despite it being one of the most popular shows in the world in the 1970s, and despite its impact on later television programmes, all things that one would think would make Upstairs Downstairs a candidate for a scholarly attention, little in the way of academic exploration of the series has appeared since the 1970s. [9] There is no mention of the Up Down in such key books in the burgeoning field of television studies as Glen Creeber’s collection Fifty Key Television Programmes, Toby Miller’s collection The Television Studies Book, Creeber’s collection The Television Genre Book, or Michelle Hilmes’s collection The Television History Book. Nor is there a monograph, at least at the moment, devoted to Up Down in either of the leading book series devoted to “television classics”, the British Film Institute’s (BFI) TV Classics series or Wayne State University’s Presses TV Milestones series.[10]

When Up Down is mentioned in what little academic literature on the show there is, it is usually to bury it for its role as a defender of the political and economic status quo in 1970’s Britain. Colin McArthur, for instance, argues that the Upstairs Downstairs episode set during the 1926 General Strike, “The Nine Day Wonder” (5:9), represents the strike in dominant ideological terms, as, in other words, an illegal action that sought to undermine the British nation and British society. Like McArthur Carl Freedman reads Upstairs Downstairs as a defender of the status quo. For Freedman Up Down is reflective of the yearnings or desires of mostly middle class viewers living in a 1970s Britain experiencing change, for a world in which everyone knew their place and all was right with Great Britain and its Empire. A few academics have come not to condemn but to explore Upstairs Downstairs. Charles Barr, James Hillier and V.F. Perkins and Catherine Itzin, for instance, focus on how the show came to be made and on those who made it.[11]

Though Downton Abbey, like Upstairs Downstairs, hasn’t generated much in the way of scholarly analysis it has generated and continues to generate a healthy amount of journalistic criticism, some of it critical, and a significant amount of media attention from old and new media, so much, in fact, during the third series that Downton mania seemed to almost achieve cultural phenomenon status in the United States. For Rachel Cook Downton Abbey is “status quo television” filled to the brim with nostalgia for the days when people knew their place and knew the difference between a duke and an earl. For Tanya Gold Downton gives viewers a sanitized portrait of the British aristocracy, a compassionate aristocracy that sends their cooks to London for cataract operations (1:7) and who forgive their butlers their music hall indiscretions (1:2). Gold makes much of the fact that Downton’s creator, Julian Fellowes, was made a peer of the realm by that new New Tory leader and Conservative prime minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, an aristocratic something Gold apparently finds particularly telling in Fellowes ideological biography. For Simon Schama, never one to mince words when in his more popular guise, Downton Abbey is snob and nostalgia television that wallows in cultural necrophilia and appeals to Americans stuck in the age of paranoid Tea Party fantasies about the evils of socialism and the absence of birth certificates. What is so interesting about so much of this condemnation of Downton as conservative status quo television is that it is very much like the criticism aimed at Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970’s. Even academic criticism apparently gets rerun sometimes.[12]

Beyond being possibly status quo television there are a number of other things Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey share. They share a genre, drama. They share subgenres, the family drama, the historical drama, the costume drama, and the upstairs downstairs drama. They share seriality. Stories in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey are not tidily wrapped up in the space of around fifty minutes so character traits that exist and events that happen in earlier episodes impact events and characters in later episodes. They share a context, the Edwardian age, the Great War, and that era after the Great War in which the hierarchical modern world was on the verge of even greater historical change than that which preceded it. But perhaps more than anything else they share a setting, a family setting.

Both Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey are largely set in Edwardian aristocratic homes, Up Down in London’s posh Belgravia at 135 Easton Place, Downton Abbey in a manor house in the Yorkshire countryside, Downton Abbey. Both share a focus on the trials and travails, loves, hoped for loves, loves lost, scandals and intrigues, and triumphs and tragedies of the Bellamy and Crawley clans, the somewhat unhappy Bellamy and Crawley clans upstairs (shades of Tolstoy’s interesting in their own way unhappy families?), and their servants downstairs. And both focus, at least in part, on the interaction between these upstairs and downstairs families with each other within the confines of a set of ritualized behaviours and manners determined by tradition, class, and status. It is these family sagas which are at the heart of both Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey.

165 Eaton Place, Belgravia, is home to the Bellamy clan upstairs, Lady Bellamy (Rachel Gurney), her husband Richard Bellamy (David Langton), Lady Bellamy’s and Richard’s oldest son James (Simon Williams), and their daughter Lady Elizabeth (Nicola Pagett). Downstairs are butler Mr. Hudson (Gordon Jackson), cook Mrs. Bridges (Angela Baddeley), parlour maid Rose (Jean Marsh), lady’s maid Mrs. Roberts (Patsy Smart), under housemaid Sarah (Pauline Collins), footman Alfred (George Innis), driver Pearce (Brian Osborne), and scullery maid Emily (Evin Crowley).

Masters and servants came and went throughout Upstairs Downstairs five series. Upstairs middle class Hazel (Meg Wynn Owen) became James’s wife in series three and died of influenza in series four. Lady Georgina (Lesley-Anne Down), daughter of Lady Marjorie’s brother Hugo, arrived as Richard’s ward in series three. Richard married Virginia Hamilton (Hannah Gordon) who brought her two children Alice (Anne Yarker) and William (Jonathan Seely) from a previous marriage with her in series five. Alfred and Pearce left service in series one to be replaced by Edward (Christopher Beeney) and Thomas (John Aldington). Emily committed suicide in series one and was replaced by Ruby (Jenny Tomasin). Sarah left service in series one to return in series two at the end of which she left along with Thomas, her new husband. Parlour maid Daisy (Jacqueline Tong) arrived in series three. Footman Frederick (Gareth Hunt) came to Eaton Place in series four while parlour maid Lily (Karen Dotrice) arrived in series five.

Like Upstairs Downstairs Downton Abbey has its family of masters upstairs and “family” of servants downstairs. Downton Abbey is the home of the Crawley clan upstairs, the Earl of Grantham, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), his American born wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), and their three daughters Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael), and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay). Downstairs are butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), head housekeeper Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), and their squabbling “children” Lord Grantham’s valet Mr. Bates (Brendon Coyle), footman Thomas (Rob James-Collier), second footman William (Thomas Howes), Irish chauffeur Branson (Allen Leech), Lady’s maid O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran), house maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt), housemaid Gwen (Rose Leslie), cook Mrs. Patmore (Leslie Nichol), and kitchen maid Daisy (Sophie McShera).

Servants come and go at Downton Abbey just as they did at Eaton Place. Gwen leaves Downton to become a secretary (1:7) and is replaced by Ethel (Amy Nuttall) (2:1) until she is forced to leave service after a scandal (2:4). Jane (Clare Calbraith) replaces Ethel (2:5) but leaves service toward the end of series two (2:7). Mr. Lang (Cal Macaninch) becomes Robert’s valet after Bates leaves service in the first episode of series two only to return after Mr. Lang leaves service as a result of his shell shock (2:3 and 2:4). Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle), Matthew’s butler/valet, becomes Matthew’s valet at Downton Abbey in series three after Matthew and Mary marry and Matthew moves into the manor house (3:3). Alfred (Matt Milne), a relative of O’Brien, becomes a footman at the beginning of series three (3:1). James “Jimmy” Kent (Ed Speelers) is taken on as second footman once Downton’s finances are put back on a sound footing after the war (3:4). Ivy Stuart (Cara Theobold) replaces Daisy as kitchen maid allowing Daisy to become Mrs. Patmore’s assistant cook (3:4).

Other members of the aristocratic Crawley family reside near to the estate. The Dowager Countess Violet (Maggie Smith) lives in the Dower house on the estate itself. The male heir to the estate, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), until he moves to the Abbey after he marries Lady Mary in series three (3:2), and his mother Isobel (Penelope Wilton) reside in the Crawley House in nearby Downton village.

Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey share more than just genre, setting, seriality, and an emphasis on masters upstairs and their servants downstairs. Both Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey begin with new downstairs arrivals. In Upstairs Downstairs Sarah arrives at Eaton Place for an interview and eventually gets the job of under parlour maid ("On Trial", 1:1). In Downton Abbey Bates arrives at the Abbey to begin work as Lord Grantham's new valet (1:1)). The arrivals of Sarah and Bates allow the writers of the first episodes of Upstairs and Downton, Fay Weldon and Julian Fellowes respectively, to introduce viewers to the main characters, master and servant dynamics, and leisure and work at 165 Eaton Place and Downton Abbey. Both Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey have downstairs run by generally tradition bound, prim, proper, snobby, and devoted to service and its rules and rituals butlers, Mr. Hudson in Upstairs and Mr. Carson in Downton. Both have mature and crusty cooks, Mrs. Bridges in Upstairs and Mrs. Patmore in Downton. Both have somewhat dim and occasionally clumsy kitchen maids, Emily in Upstairs and Daisy in Downton. Both have scheming and rather “sinister” footmen, Alfred in Upstairs and Thomas in Downton. Both footmen, by the way, engage in homosexual relationships with aristocratic visitors to Eaton Place and Downton Abbey in the first series of each show. (Upstairs, "A Suitable Marriage", 1:5, Downton 1:3). Both have aristocratic daughters who become involved in radical causes, Miss Elizabeth in Up Down and Lady Sybil in Downton (Upstairs Downstairs "The Key of the Door", 1:12, "For Love of Love, 1:13, and "Special Mischief”, 2:10, Downton 1:6). Both have aristocratic radical daughters who marry scandalously, Miss Elizabeth in Up Down and Lady Sybil in Downton (Upstairs 1:10 and 1:13, Downton 2:7 and 2:8). Both have aristocratic or soon to be aristocratic men who go missing in action during the Great War, James in Upstairs Downstairs (“Missing Believed Killed”, 4:11) and Matthew in Downton Abbey (2:4). Both have ladies of the house who become nurses during World War I, Lady Georgina in Up Down (Series Four) and Lady Sybil in Downton (Series Two). Both have ladies of the house affected by Spanish flu after the end of the Great War, Hazel in Up Down and Cora in Downton (Up Down 4:13, Downton 2:8). Both have young female Twenties rebels come to live in their great houses well into the series, Lady Georgina the step-daughter of Lady Marjorie's brother Hugo, arrives at Eaton Place in Series Three (“Goodwill to All Men”, 3:9) while Violet’s great niece Lady Rose (Lily James) arrives at Downtown Abbey the end of Series Three (3:8). In both the sinking of the RMS Titanic play critical roles in the plot. In Upstairs Downstairs Lady Marjorie Bellamy dies while sailing on the Titanic to New York to visit daughter Elizabeth in the United States and her brother in Canada ("Miss Forrest", 3:1 and "A House Divided", 3:2) while in Downton Abbey Lord Grantham’s cousin and heir presumptive James Crawley and his son Patrick, the latter the fiancée of Lady Mary, die when the Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic setting in motion the chain of events related to the entail, the tying of the land, the basis of aristocratic wealth, and titles to primogeniture, that will dominate the first and second series of the show.[13]

Though there are significant similarities between Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey, similarities that while circumstantial cannot be ascribed solely to shared genre, shared general setting, shared seriality, and a shared emphasis on masters upstairs and their servants downstairs and as a result must be ascribed to the influence of Upstairs Downstairs on Downton Abbey,[14] there are also significant differences between the two dramas which distinguish them from one another. Downton Abbey is set in a much larger house with many more servants than the Belgrave home of the Bellamy clan. Upstairs Downstairs is, as was the case with British television and particularly British “quality” television costume dramas throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, [15 a kind of "electronic theatre".[16] It was, for the most part, shot live in the studio over a three-hour period on Friday after a week of rehearsal and recorded largely on videotape. Its pace, like the pace of most television programmes at the time, is leisurely, particularly when compared to today’s much faster film and television rhythm.[17] Downton Abbey, on the other hand, as has become increasingly common in British television since the 1980s and 1990s, bears the increasing imprint of film and American television, itself, at least by the late 1950’s, the child of Hollywood cinema. It is filmed at Ealing Studios and on location at Highclere Castle, Bampton in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, and London with digital cameras.[18] As a result it takes much more time to make an episode of Downton than it took to make an episode of Upstairs Downstairs. Camera setups and lighting for filmed dramas like Downton alone can and often do take hours, as long or longer, in other words, as it took to record a single episode of Upstairs Downstairs.

As a contemporary filmed drama Downton is characterized by much more editing than was Up Down. While some scenes in Upstairs Downstairs last close to ten minutes and contain healthy amounts of dialogue Downton Abbey’s scenes generally last less than five minutes, some less than even a minute, with much less dialogue. Even history runs at a faster pace in Downton that it did in Upstairs Downstairs. It took two series of thirteen episodes each for Upstairs Downstairs to get from the Titanic to World War I. It has taken Downton Abbey one series of seven episodes to cover the same historical terrain.

Though Helen Wheatley argues, without any empirical audience analysis evidence for support, that viewers in the 1970s derived pleasure from Upstairs Downstairs domestic space with its period detail of Edwardian manners, language, routines, food, and costumes, Up Down, given that it was largely recorded on videotape, is nowhere near as lush as Downton Abbey.[19] The studio sets of Upstairs Downstairs with their aristocratic material culture may exude aristocracy but the cinematography of Up Down is no where near as rich as that of Downton Abbey with its lush and elegant depictions of nature, the estate, its aristocrats upstairs, Downton village, and upstairs itself in its stately camera movements. Camera movements downstairs, by the way, are far less rich, much more energetic and shaky thanks to more extensive camera movement, and much faster in pace exuding an almost documentary like quality, something quite common, perhaps too common, in the post The Office (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, BBC, 2001-2003) television world.[20]

Downton and Upstairs Downstairs differ in their mise-en-scène in other ways as well. Downton’s use of music is quite different from that of Upstairs Downstairs. Orchestral music in Downton is quite extensive and punctuates, underlines, and reflects the narrative in each episode, as was common in classical cinema. Music in Upstairs Downstairs, on the other hand, music scored by Alexander Faris, music which nicely captures the Elgarian and Edwardian music hall spirit of the age, was generally only used during the opening title sequence, during act breaks (before and after commercial breaks), and during closing credit sequences, making it more akin to the limited use of music in non-musical theatre.

The differences between Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey aren't simply differences of film style or mise-en-scène. Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey are also somewhat different in their narrative themes. Piers Wenger argues that while Upstairs’ plots centre around history Downton’s centre around class. And it is true both dramas are inherently about class and the complexities of class-consciousness given the upstairs downstairs, masters and servants, upper class and working class, structure of each show. But what really makes Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey different from each other is the differing roles the narrative themes of scandal, history, intrigue, deception, and romance play in each show.[21]

Scandal and attempts to contain scandals is one of the narrative themes at the heart of Upstairs Downstairs. And there is a lot of scandal (only a few of which are noted here) in Up Down. James flirts with and has an affair with downstairs maid Sarah, an affair that ends in Sarah’s pregnancy, acts beastly toward his wife Hazel after she has a miscarriage, has an affair with the wife of his "longest friend" Bunny Newbury (John Quayle), and commits suicide after losing his and now lady’s maid Rose's savings during the stock market crash leading to the sale of 165 Eaton Place ("Board Wages", 1:3, "A Pair of Exiles", 2:2, "Distant Thunder", 3:12, "An Old Flame", 5:6, "All the King's Horses", 5:13, "Whither Shall I Wander". 5:14). Lady Elizabeth refuses to conform to custom and involves herself in "radical” causes and bohemian practises, has a failed marriage, has an affair that ends in pregnancy, and has an affair with a rich publisher on the make ("The Path of Duty", 1:4, "The Key of the Door", 1:12, "For Love of Love", 1:13, "The New Man", 2:1, "Married Love", 2:3, "Whom God Hath Joined", 2:4, "A Special Mischief", 2:10, "The Fruits of Love", 2:11). Lady Bellamy has an affair with a British officer home from the Indian subcontinent ("Magic Casements", 1:7, "The Property of a Lady", 2:6). Miss Georgina spurns the advances of a paramour who ends up taking his life at a wild Twenties party at the Bellamy home, scandalously plays a prostitute in a film in which she is paired with 165’s footman Frederick (Gareth Hunt) moonlighting, and accidentally kills a biker after a drink soaked scavenger hunt ("Laugh a Little Louder", 5:3, "Alberto", 5:11, "Joke Over", 5:13). Upstairs’s downstairs has its share of "unsuitable" scandals as well whether its the scullery maid Emily committing suicide when her relationship with a footman from another house is forbidden ("I Dies from Love", 1:8), Mrs. Bridges taking a baby from its perambulator on the street while distraught over the death of Emily ("Why is Her Door Locked?", 1:8), Sarah taking part in a plan to steal valuables from the Bellamy household ("The Swedish Tiger", 1:9), unmarried Sarah getting pregnant, twice ("A Pair of Exiles", 2:2, "The Wages of Sin", 2:12), Thomas's questionable scheming to better his position downstairs, to better his financial position, or getting Sarah pregnant, without revealing to those upstairs that he is the father ("The Property of a Lady", 2:6, "The Wages of Sin", 2:12), Alfred having a homosexual relationship with a visiting German aristocrat and spy and returning to Eaton Place after murdering his brutal aristocratic lover ("A Suitable Marriage", 1:5, "Rose's Pigeon", 3:5), Mr. Hudson falling in love with house maid Lily ("Disillusion", 5:7), Frederick trying to undermine Edward's position as acting butler in the wake of Hudson's heart attack ("The Understudy", 5:10) or becoming the "kept man" of Lady Dorothy "Dolly" Hale (Madeleine Cannon) ("Alberto", 5:11). The Bellamy’s spend considerable time and energy trying to contain these scandals, mostly successfully, over the course of the show.

History and historical change (the death of a monarch, the coming of war, increasing industrialization, the rise of labour) is another narrative theme at the heart of Upstairs Downstairs. Up Down uses history, in fact, in such a way that it recalls the Reithian remit and the use of science and history in Doctor Who, as opportunities for teaching moments Over five series Upstairs Downstairs took viewers back to the Edwardian age, the age of jazz, the flapper, phonographs, the wireless, the king's speech, tabloids, the rise of labour, the general strike, the age of cinema, the American age, and the stock market crash of 1929. And it took viewers back to World War I.

For many critics and for many of the Upstairs Downstairs cast and crew themselves, Series Four centring on the Great War, was the high point of the series.[22] Series Four really begins with the final two episodes of Series Three. "Distant Thunder" (3:12) and "A Sudden Storm" (3:13), place the Bellamy family saga in the context of rising tensions in Europe. “A Sudden Storm” ends with the declaration of war between Great Britain and Germany and captures superbly the patriotic mania that gripped Great Britain at the time along with the common belief that the Britain and her allies would win the war in a few months.

Series Four uses history in the same way that Upstairs Downstairs always has used history since its inception. It weaves important aspects of World War I into the Bellamy family saga upstairs and servant life downstairs. In "A Patriotic Offering" (4:1) the Bellamy's take in a Belgian refugee family which, since they turn out to be Belgian peasants, are moved downstairs for the servants to take care of while James is off to the Western Front. In "News from the Front" (4:2) James, home from the front, inadvertently reveals important information about the war to Sir Richard's Tory colleagues who use it to further Tory attempts to force the Liberals into a coalition government. As a result James is posted, against his will, to general staff behind battle lines. In "The Beastly Hun" (4:3) Hudson’s xenophobia about the beastly Huns and their rape and brutalisation of poor Belgium, rears its ugly head—Hudson rails against foreigners on occasion in Upstairs often in scripts authored by Jeremy Paul. Meanwhile outside the Bellamy home British anti-German xenophobia reaches its zenith with an attack on a German born baker and his family, a baker from whom the Bellamys buy goods, and their establishment. In "Women Shall Not Weep" (4:4) Edward goes off to war after marrying under housemaid Daisy, scullery maid Ruby, goes off to make munitions at Silverton along the Thames, and Lady Georgina takes her first steps to becoming a volunteer war nurse. In "Tug of War" (4:5) Georgina begins working in a hospital on the home front while James returns from the front depressed about the real war that those on the home front know little to nothing about thanks to government propaganda. In the eighth episode, "The Glorious Dead" (4:8) Rose learns that her fiancée, Gregory Wilmot (Keith Barron) has died "quickly" and "without pain" on the Western Front. In "Another Year" (4:9) Edward returns home suffering from shell shock. In "The Heroes Farewell" (4:10) Ruby returns to Eaton Place after the munitions factory she works in is bombed by a German zeppelins. In episode eleven, "Missing Believed Killed", James, who was sent back to the front after Hazel, James's wife, pleads his case to his colonel, is missing and presumed dead. He is eventually found in a hospital on the Western Front in which Georgina is working and is brought home by the Bellamy's, one of the perks of privilege apparently. In "Peace out of Pain" (4:13) the war ends but the Bellamy saga continues as Hazel is killed by the Spanish influenza, the flu that killed more men and women than the Great War.

Though the war is over by the end of Upstairs Downstairs series four the war is neither out of sight nor out of mind in Series Five. In "On With the Dance" (5:1), James continues to suffer from the trauma of the Great War specifically shell shock. In "A Place in the World" (5:2) Edward, who has left service, for the moment at least, along with his wife downstairs maid Daisy, is, like so many other former British soldiers, out of work.[23]

The Great War, and history in general, play a much less central and far more peripheral role in Downton Abbey and the Grantham Saga than it does in Upstairs Downstairs. The sinking of the Titanic is there but its function is more to move the narrative about the entail along than about the Titanic itself. World War I is there but it is more a narrative prop to, thanks to Matthew’s frequent leaves back to England and visits to Downton Abbey and the injury that leaves him likely unable to walk and have children in the future (2:5), move Matthew’s and Mary’s will they, won’t they relationship along. The Great War serves a similar function in the Thomas narrative strand. Thomas may be serving in the medical corps in the trenches, the same trenches Matthew is serving in during the War, but the focus of the narrative is less on what Thomas does during the war than on Thomas’s schemes to get out of the trenches and return to Downton Abbey, schemes that come to fruition when Thomas successfully engineers having his hand shot so can return to England (2:2) so that the Thomas and O’Brien versus Bates and Anna narrative thread can continue.

It is not history or scandal and attempts to contain these scandals that are at the heart of the first three series of Downton Abbey. Yes Downton Abbey does, like Upstairs Downstairs, have its share of scandals. Lady Mary, for instance, has a premarital affair with a “Turkish” embassy attaché visiting Downton, Kemal Pamuk (Theo James), resulting in his death and necessitating that Cora and Anna help Mary move the body out of Mary’s bedroom (1:3), housemaid Ethel has an affair with a wounded officer convalescing at Downton and ends up pregnant (2:4), Lord Grantham loses the family fortune (3:1), Branson shows up at dinner without tails (3:1). And yes the show does have its share of trying to contai these scandals. Cora and the Dowager Countess Violet, for instance, intrigue to keep Lady Mary’s affair with Mr. Pamuk secret (1:6), Robert initially keeps his financial problems hidden from his daughters and those downstairs (3:1, 3:2, 3:3, 3:4). Rather it is intrigues, schemings, deceptions, secrets, romance, and change that are at the narrative heart of the first three series of Downton Abbey.[24]

Throughout Downton’s first series Lady Cora and the Dowager Countess intrigue to break the entail which means that the Grantham estate, including the dowry monies Cora brought with her when she married Robert, have to go to distant male heirs rather than to Lady Mary. Cora and the Dowager Countess intrigue to marry Mary off to Matthew and if not to Matthew than to some other appropriate suitor (even a rich Italian) particularly after whispers of Mary’s illicit affair with Mr. Pamuk begin to circulate throughout British polite aristocratic society (1:6). Lady Mary and Lady Edith constantly conspire against each other. Stung by Lady Mary’s sharp tongue telling her that she can take any man Lady Edith wants, Lady Edith writes to the “Turkish” ambassador informing him of Lady Mary’s illicit affair with Mr. Pamuk. When Lady Mary learns that Lady Edith has written the letter she pays Lady Edith back by successfully scheming to keep Sir Anthony Strallan (Robert Bathurst) from asking Lady Edith to marry him (1:5, 1:6). The family intrigues to make Branson, the radical Irish chauffeur Lady Sybil marries, into someone of Lady Sybil’s status (2:7). Lady Mary and Violet conspire to obtain money from Cora’s mother Violet to save the estate after Robert’s investments in Canadian rail fail (3:1 and 3:2).

Intrigues and deceptions don’t occur only upstairs. Servants Thomas and O’Brien, scheme to get Bates fired so that Thomas can become the Lord Grantham’s valet (1:4, 1:5, 1:6). Bates and Anna scheme to turn the tables on Thomas and O’Brien, or at least to make them think they turned the tables (1:5). Thomas intrigues to turn his sexual relationship with a visiting duke into a change of status and home. He wants to be the Duke of Crowborough’s (Charlie Cox) valet (1:2). The duke, however, refuses to take him on and doesn’t have to since he has secretly stolen the love letters he wrote to Thomas while wondering with Lady Mary through the servant’s quarters (1:1). Thomas schemes to steal wine from the wine cellar and to blame it on Bates (1:5, 1:6). O’Brien intrigues to revenge herself on Cora because she thinks Cora is about to replace her as her lady’s maid. O’Brien places soap on the floor where she knows Cora will step when she gets out of the bathtub. Cora slips on the soap as O’Brien intended, an injury that ends in the miscarriage of Cora’s child. The miscarried child, it turns out, was the male heir that Lord Grantham had been hoping for, a male heir that Lord Grantham had long wanted, the male heir who would have inherited Downton Abbey keeping the estate in the immediate Crawley family (1:7). Thomas and O’Brien scheme to use Cora to bring Thomas to the Downton village hospital and then to put Thomas in charge of the convalescent centre for officers housed in the Abbey (2:2, 2:3). Daisy intrigues to make Mrs. Bird’s cooking less than edible while Mrs. Patmore is away in London having an operation on her eyes (1:7). Bates’s wife Vera (Maria Doyle Kennedy) schemes to get him back and does so, at least for while, by threatening to reveal Lady Mary’s illicit affair to the tabloid press (2:2). O’Brien schemes to get her nephew Alfred a position at Downton and intrigues against Thomas when Thomas schemes against Alfred to keep him from moving up the hierarchical servant ladder to valet (3:1 and 3:2). Thomas intrigues against O’Brien by telling Mr. Molesley that O’Brien is leaving and Molesley, in turn, informs the family upstairs as he has a replacement for her in mind (3:2). O’Brien schemes against Thomas by manipulating new footman James’s discomfort with Thomas’s close attentions and by manipulating Thomas by telling him that “Jimmy” has told her how much he likes him (3:5, 3:7, 3:8).

Deceptions and secrets are another narrative thread that is at the heart of Downton Abbey. There is the secret about Lady Mary’s indiscretion with Mr. Pamuk. There is Cora’s and the Dowager Countesses' secret that they know about Mary’s “indiscretion”. There is Lord Grantham’s secret that Thomas is a thief (1:6). There is Lady Sybil’s secret that she is attending “radical” political rallies. There is Bates’s secret that he is married, was an alcoholic, and was a thief. There is O’Brien’s secret that she plotted to injure Cora (1:7). There is Thomas’s secret that he is gay. There is Lavinia’s, Matthew’s fiancée, secret, that she stole government documents that reveal governmental corruption in order to save her father from the blackmailing schemes of tabloid newspaper magnate Sir Richard Carlisle (2:3). There is Robert’s attempts to hide his money loss from his daughters and the servants downstairs (3:1, 3:2, 3:3, 3:4).

Romance is another theme, the theme that most resonates with viewers if viewer comments, mostly from women, at the PBS Facebook Masterpiece page are a guide, that is at the narrative heart of Downton Abbey.[25] At the heart of Downton’s romances are the parallel romances between Mary and Matthew, Sybil and Branson, Anna and Bates, and Daisy and William, parallel romances that are sometimes reflected in the editing of the show as in episode 4 of Series Two where each of the relationships are touched on in succession in the last several minutes of the episode. At the heart of these parallel romances is that seemingly endless eternal literary, film, and television question of will they or won’t they, will they or won’t they be able find ways to surmount the problems they face—bad timing and war wounds, wicked wives and intrigues by other servants, class barriers, and does she really love him or is she just doing her wartime duty respectively—and find true love and happiness together. Downton’s romances are, in particular, at the heart of Series Two. In episode 5 Daisy marries a dying William but feels guilt for doing so for she didn’t love him like, as she says, he loved her (2:5). She comes to grips with her love for and marriage to William and her relationship to William’s father (Paul Copley) in the Christmas episode of series two. In episodes 7 and 8 Sybil decides to marry Branson and, after much gnashing of teeth, the Grantham’s finally accept, if tenuously, Branson into the family. After a flirtation with Patrick (2:6) Lady Edith renews her relationship with Sir Anthony Strallan in the Christmas episode of series two. In episode 8 Bates and Anna finally marry just before Bates is arrested for murdering his wife Vera. At the end of series two Robert and Cora are apparently reconciled after their respective flings with the housemaid Jane and the running of Downton Abbey in war and all that entails. In the Christmas episode Bates is tried and convicted of murder, Robert and Matthew are finally told Mary’s secret about Mr. Pamuk, and Matthew finally proposes to Mary.[26]

Romance continues to be a major theme in Series Three. Matthew and Mary marry early in series three (3:2) and their relationships has ups and downs throughout series three, including downs over Matthew’s refusal, at first, to use his inheritance from Reggie Swire to save Mary’s beloved Downton Abbey (3:1, 3:2, 3:3). Edith’s relationship with Strallan ends when Sir Anthony leaves Edith at the altar (3:3). Lady Edith takes up with her married publisher, Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards), in the 2012 Christmas episode. Anna continues to try to prove Bates’s innocence and their relationship, though it has some tense moments as when both think that each has given up on the other as a result of prison authorities stopping the flow of Bates’s letters to Anna and Anna’s to Bates (3:4), is renewed when Bates is released from prison after detective Anna uncovers the truth, that Vera has killed herself in order to put the blame on Bates (3:6).[27]

Change, change as a plot device rather than as an almost pedagogical strategy as in Upstairs Downstairs, is another important theme at the narrative heart of Downton Abbey. Downton begins with change, the death of Patrick, heir to Downton on the Titanic in 1912, and the impact of that dramatic and tragic change particularly on the masters upstairs. Change continues to impact Downton Abbey throughout series one and two whether it is Sybil’s relationship and eventual marriage to the chauffeur Branson or Mary’s relationship with Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen), a self made tabloid magnate who plans to buy an old manor house from a family that has fallen on hard times and modernize it after he and Mary are married.

While change has been important in earlier series' of Downton Abbey it is in the Third Series that change and its impact on Downton Abbey’s masters, particularly Robert upstairs, and servants, particularly Carson downstairs, becomes central to Downton Abbey. Series Three begins in March of 1920, an era of change, thanks, in part, to the Great War, economic change, social movements like the suffragette movement, the Irish Republican movement, greater job opportunities for lower class men and women outside of service, and the motor car. The winds of financial change blow across Downton Abbey as Robert learns that the money, he invested in a railroad in Canada, Cora’s money, has been lost putting the Crawley’s future and the Crawley ownership of Downton Abbey itself in peril. Downton is conveniently saved when Matthew receives an inheritance from Reggie Swire in Downton, the father of his former fiancée Lavinia (3:3), but his “modern” management style and that of his ally Tom, clashes with that of Robert (3:4, 3:5, 3:6, 3:6, 3:7). After Sybil’s death Robert becomes more open to changes at Downton and he eventually comes to see the changes in the management of the estate that Matthew and Tom bring as Downton Abbey’s salvation. As Hugh “Shrimpy” MacClaire (Peter Egan), who loses his Scottish Highlands home because he didn’t modernize his estate, says to Robert in the third series Christmas special, it was Matthew’s and Tom’s changes that saved Downton Abbey and by this time Robert knows that.

Change isn’t something that impacts only the Crawley estate. It also impacts the Crawley family itself. Branson, who has come to Downton with Sybil to attend Lady Mary’s wedding, and his lack of proper formal dinner wear, his attitudes toward British rule in Ireland, attitudes Robert finds wrongheaded, and his arguments for changes in Ireland are out of place in the traditional world of Downton Abbey (3:1 and 3:4). Cora’s mother, Martha Levinson (Shirley MacLaine), who like Branson has come to Downton for Lady Mary’s and Matthew’s wedding and who has brought with her an American attitude to openness and promotion of some of the winds of change, is out of place in tradition drenched Downton Abbey (3:1 and 3:2). Edith becomes a reporter over Robert’s objections (3:5, 2012 Christmas Special) that her editor wants not for her skills but because she has a title. Sybil’s death is caused, at least in part, by Robert’s decision to have obstetrician to England’s elite, Sir Philip Tapsel (Tim Pigott-Smith), replace family doctor Doctor Clarkson (David Robb) (3:5). Matthew dies in an AS motor car, perhaps the most dramatic symbol of change after the Great War, that he purchases after his and Mary’s honeymoon (3:2). Even the clothes, or at least the servants, seem to conspiring to bring change to the Abbey. Matthew and Robert dress improperly for dinner (3:2) thanks to the continuing battle between Thomas and O’Brien.

Bittersweet Series Three leaves us viewers with a lot of questions to ponder as we await for series four. What is going to happen to Downton Abbey now that Matthew is dead and Tom is still in mourning after the death of Lady Sybil? What is to happen to Lady Mary now that Matthew is dead? What will happen to Tom and Sybil? Where is Edith’s relationship with her married editor heading?? Will Thomas’s feud with Bates end now that he is under butler to Bates’s valet or will power go to Thomas’s head? Will Thomas’s and O’Brien’s war of intrigue against each other heat up again? Will Thomas find true love with Jimmy? Will Daisy leave Downton to help Mr. Mason run his farm? Will O’Brien take revenge on Bates somehow?[28] Series four and five, of course, provide answers to many if not most of these questions.

In her essay on Up Down Helen Wheatley decries the lack of critical attention paid to textual aspects of British studio historical dramas of the past like Upstairs Downstairs.[29] Unfortunately this lack of critical attention has continued into the present with filmed historical dramas like Downton Abbey receiving as little attention behind the ivy covered walls of academe as Up Down did. This paper attempts to redress this critical inattention by attempting to explore the similarities and differences, particularly the narrative similarities and differences, between Upstairs and Downstairs and Downton Abbey. As I have tried to make clear there are a number of similarities between the two dramas—genre, subgenres, seriality, settings, the fact that Downton was heavily influenced by Upstairs in several ways—and differences between the two shows. Downton, as I have tried to show, is much less centred around history and scandal, the central narrative themes of Upstairs Down while Downton plays extensively with narrative themes of intrigue, deceit and romance.[30]

I don’t want to suggest that my focus in this paper on specific narrative themes in both Up Down and Downton is the be all and end all of Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey criticism and studies. My brief list of central narrative themes is intended to be introductory rather than exhaustive. One could, for instance, profitably explore the theme of death and loss in Upstairs Downstairs, Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey as soap operas, [31] and narrative parallels between what is happening upstairs and what is happening downstairs. Going beyond narrative one could explore further aspects of mise-en-scène than I have in this paper, including, for example, the role of photographs play in maintaining memory in Up Down, the increased amount of filming outside of the studio that was done in series five of Upstairs Downstairs, the fascinating conjunction between theatricality and historical verisimilitude in Up Down, 165 Eaton Place and Downton Abbey as characters in Up Down and Downton Abbey, the importance of costumes and food and the look of clothes and food, upstairs and downstairs, in both shows, the importance of sound in Upstairs Downstairs, the sound of expensively dressed masters upstairs sitting down on expensive leather couches upstairs in Upstairs Downstairs, the sound of aristocrats pouring sherry from decanters into exquisite glasses in the morning room upstairs in Upstairs Downstairs, and the sound of servants leather shoes as they go about their daily routines in Upstairs Downstairs, or the role of mirrors in Downton Abbey. All of these deserve far more critical attention than they have received thus far.

So too do the obsessions with the politics of class, gender, colonialism, and history that impacts so much of the research and writing in the intellectual and academic world today. While much has been written about the “reactionary” nostalgia of heritage costume dramas like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey and their celebration of spectacular aristocratic landscapes, spectacular aristocratic stately homes, spectacular aristocratic period décor, spectacular aristocratic period food, spectacular aristocratic period fashions, spectacular aristocratic period fabrics, and the spectacular period furnishings of England’s privileged Anglo-Saxons of the past and in so doing contribute to a sense of English identity, an argument I don’t yet find fully convincing because I think much more research on the historical context and politics of both television shows needs to be done.[32]

Upstairs Downstairs, for instance, was made in an era in which television thanks to BBC 1, BBC 2, and ITV, became the most popular form of leisure in Great Britain,[33] in which Harold Wilson and Edward Heath played prime ministerial musical chairs, in which the consumer society expanded, in which standards of living increased, in which the British class system went through increasing transformations, in which education expanded, in which the troubles in Northern Ireland exploded, in which ties between the UK and the EEC increased, in which economic stagflation came thanks in large part to the oil crises of 1973 and 1975, in which celebrity culture expanded, something in which television played an important role, in which multiculturalism, particularly in the cities, increased, in which urban and racial violence increased, and in which a neoliberal austerity gained ascendency when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, four years after Upstairs Downstairs ended. Downton Abbey and its predecessor Gosford Park, on the other hand, took form in the era of New Labour, an age that saw Labour move away from its labour roots in favour of the holy electoral grail of the political centre, the ascendency of Tony Blair, economic growth, a rise in real incomes, market based reforms, further transformations in the British class system, political devolution, increased spending on education, the institution of a minimum wage, economic collapse in 2008, and many more television viewing choices whether over the air, on cable, or on the World Wide Web thanks, particularly to government policies, the growth of cable, and the rise of new digital technologies. Much more analysis, in my estimation, needs to be done on the connections between both of these eras of political and economic stability and instability, economic growth and economic decline, the transformation of the British class system, conceptions of Englishness, and nostalgia for a remembered English past in the midst of all this change, and the Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey that were made during these somewhat different periods of British history.

There may be, as Andrew Higson notes, contradictions in Britain’s television heritage costume dramas both in terms of their production contexts and their consumption. Recent costume dramas, Higson writes, may be as parodic, farcical, and transgressive as nostalgic and they may be read more as soap operaish, romantic, and even multicultural by its viewers than nationalistic.[34] For instance, the class backgrounds of the creators and, in the cases of Alfred Shaughnessy, John Hawksworth, and Julian Fellowes the writers, of Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey, foreground the complexity of the relationship between class and television in Britain in the mid 1970s and in the 2010s. Downstairs' creators Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins hail from working class backgrounds and had relatives who were servants. Alfred Shaughnessy attended Eton, Oxford, and Sandhurst, and his stepfather, the Honourable Sir Piers “Joey” Legh, was equerry to the Prince of Wales and master of the household of George VI though his father was an American of Irish background. John Hawksworth was the son of an army officer and went to the Rugby School, Oxford, rose to the Captain in the military, spent time in Picasso’s studio in Paris, and started his career in entertainment in film set design.

These various class backgrounds of Up Down’s creators did and do clearly impact that television show. Originally Up Down was going to centre on two maids in a Victorian country house—remnants of this idea remain in the show in the relationship between Rose and her parlour or house maid comrade in arms Sarah in the early episodes of the first series—but by the time it began to air in 1971 the focus of the show had broadened out, thanks to Shaughnessy and Hawksworth, to include not only the lives of two servants downstairs but also the lives, loves, travails, and times of all the other servants and all the upstairs masters. It was this focus on both upstairs and downstairs which distinguished Upstairs Downstairs from that earlier and tremendously successful BBC2 adaptation of John Gallsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (BBC, 1967) which focused on the trials and travails of the aristocratic Forsyte family between 1879 and 1926. While watching The Forsyte Saga Atkins and Marsh wondered why they had never seen those who kept the Forsyte house looking the way it did and the Forsyte clan looking the way they did and eating the food they were, the servants. This focus not only on masters but also on servants which made and makes Up Down even today an important and significant television event in British television history. Many of the cast and crew ascribe Upstairs Downstairs’s scrupulous attention to historical detail (language, manners, rituals, decor aristocratic space upstairs, servant space downstairs, contemporary hoovers or vacuum cleaners, aristocratic clothes, servant uniforms, and so on) to producer John Hawksworth, who was in the military, and story editor Alfred Shaughnessy, who grew up in an Edwardian manor house.[35]

If there is a nostalgia for a more ordered past in which everyone knew their place and all was right with the empire in both Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey it is a nostalgia tinged with more ambiguity about that mythic remembered past than many critics would like to admit. In the episode of Upstairs Downstairs that MacArthur is so critical of because of its supposed negative representation of the general strike, “The Nine Days Wonder” (5:9), for instance, most of those upstairs do oppose the strike including James, who, like his father is a Tory and who had run for the House of Commons on the Conservative ticket (“A Place in the World”, 5:2) and who drives a bus to help break the general strike called by the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) in support of miners strike in opposition to wage reductions and worsening work conditions in the episode. Some downstairs oppose the strike as well including downstairs’ conservative patriarch, butler Mr. Hudson. Other servants, however, speak quite vocally in favour of the strike including Edward, Rose, and Ruby whose coal miner Uncle Len Finch (John Breslin) and his friend Arnold Thompson (Roy Pattison) come to visit Ruby and speak eloquently in favour of the strike and the reasons for it.[36]

Downton Abbey has a degree of ambiguity as well. Downton’s creator Julian Fellowes may have had a diplomat father, may have grown up in posh South Kensington, may have matriculated at public schools and Cambridge, may have married into the peerage, and may be a Tory peer but the Downton masters he has created and for whom he writes are not always saintly. Lord Grantham has his failings as is particularly apparent in series three. Nor are Downton’s servants always sinners. Even Thomas and O’Brien have their redeeming qualities. If there is anyone who is the moral centre of Downton Abbey it is probably the servants Bates and Anna, though even they are tainted with criminality. And while it is true, in general, that the upstairs aristocrats of Downton Abbey are close with and friendly toward the servants below stairs, even touching and hugging them on occasion, there is some historical evidence for the kind of welfare aristocracyism that seems to be practiced at Downton Abbey, a welfare aristocracyism that keeps a Bates with a leg injured during the Boer War in service and which sends Mrs. Patmore to London for an eye operation, despite some claims to the contrary. Personally, I think there is a lot more romance in Downton Abbey than nostalgia.[37]

There is also a significant degree of what might be called utopianism in Downton. In series three Fellowes seems to be saying that the humane aristocraycism of Lord Grantham plus the humane and practical middle-class liberalism of Matthew plus the humane socialism of Branson equals salvation for the Abbey. By the end of the series, however, Branson, who has gone to American with his and Lady Sybil's daughter, has a road to Damascus conversion experience and has become a staunch defender of America's "social mobility" Gilded Age capitalism. By the end of the series, Fellowes seems to suggest, Grantham's humane upper-class aristocratism, Lady Mary's pragmatic mixture of posh aristocracyism and Matthew's humane middle-class practicality, and Branson's newly found devotion to Gilded Age social mobility capitalism, save the Abbey for familial posterity. Cool Britanamerica.

In an academic world where films and television shows are seen as mirrors of gender, class, age, nostalgia, heritage, and colonialism, there is a critical and interpretive problem at the heart of much contemporary film and television, a critical problem that needs to be addressed. The fundamental problem with a crystal ball textualism that sees film and television as the products of gender, class, age, and politics is that it makes far too few connections between the people who make film and television, the industry that produces film and television, the film and television they make, the contexts in which film and television are made, and their contention that Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey are regressive strolls down empire lane. The problem is that there is no way to verify this hypothesis on the basis of purely textual evidence, the evidence of Up Down and Downton alone. In order to close this donut like hole at the heart of television studies we need to study television as People (the men and women who made Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey happen), as Business (the industrial culture or cultures in which Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey were made), as Technology (the technological factors that impacted Up Down and Downton), as Forms (the genres and languages Up Down and Downton deploy), as Representations (what do both shows tell us about the British society, its society, its concerns, its citizens, and the wider world), as Spectators (how has the television watching culture developed in the UK and beyond? who watches Up Down and Downton? where? in what conditions? why?), and as Debates (how have Upstairs Downstairs and Downton been represented and debated in British society and beyond?).[38] And any criticism worth its historical salt has to, if we want to fully understand films and television shows economically, politically, culturally, and geographically, do them all. I hope this brief historical and exegetical essay, the necessary first steps on which any hermeneutical analysis of Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey must be founded, has contributed, if only slightly and tentatively, to, putting the donut dough back in the glazed donut hole that is crystal ball textualism.[39]

End Notes

1. I want to thank Penny Fielding, Matthew Hendley, Nathaniel Bouman, and Scott F. Stoddart for their help with this paper over the course of its long period of gestation between the summer of 2011 and the summer of 2013. Primary source material used in this paper includes the DVD’s of each show Upstairs Downstairs, The Complete Series, Network and Acorn, Downton Abbey, Series One, Universal Playback and PBS, Downton Abbey, Series Two, Universal Playback and PBS, and Downton Abbey, Series Three, Universal Playback and PBS, and interviews with those involved on both shows including Bob Frost, The HistoryAccess.com Interviews: Upstairs, Downstairs, Interviews with John Hawksworth, Jean Marsh, and Jeremy Paul, 1995-1996, “The Story of Upstairs Downstairs”, five parts, on Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Network and Acorn, Upstairs Downstairs Remembered”, on Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Network and Acorn, Upstairs Downstairs, Q&A , BFI, 23 December 2010, Downton Abbey, Q&A , BFI, 21 September 2010, Downton Abbey, Season 2: A Special Q&A with the Cast, Downton Abbey, PBS. For secondary work on Upstairs Downstairs see Richard Marson’s, Inside UpDown: The Story of Upstairs, Downstairs (Handsworth Wood, UK: Kaleidoscope, 2011). A wonderful Upstairs Downstairs site can be found at Upstairs Downstairs. For interesting secondary analyses of Downton Abbey see Austenprose—A Jane Austen Blog, the Heroes and Heartbreakers Downton Abbey section, and the Downton Abbey Wiki.

 

2. Mark Lawson, "TV Review: Downton Abbey", the Guardian, 7 November 2010,David Breaker, “Posh and Posher: Downton Abbey Vs Upstairs Downstairs”, the Spectator, no original date, accessed 14 January 2012, Mary McNamara, "Aristocrats and Servants Face a Changing World in Downton Abbey", Los Angeles Times, 9 January 2011, Rob Owen, “Tuned In: Downton Abbey Revisits the British Class System”, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 31 December 2010, Alessandra Stanley, "Sincerest Forms of Flattery for British Shows", New York Times, 6 January 2011, John Plunkett, ,"War Declared as Upstairs, Downstairs Creator Fires Volley at Downton Abbey", the Guardian, 16 December 2010, and Simon Schama, “No Downers in Downton: Why Have Americans Fallen For a Show That Serves up Snobbery by the Bucketfuls?”, Newsweek, 16 January 2012, reprinted online in The Daily Beast. 

 

3. "Interview with Jean Marsh", The One Show, BBC 1, 14 December 2010. Also see John Plunkett, ,"War Declared as Upstairs, Downstairs Creator Fires Volley at Downton Abbey", the Guardian, 16 December 2010, and Maggie Brown, “Downton Creator Praises Upstairs Downstairs”, the Guardian, 24 December 2010. 

 

4. Not the BBC as Carl Freedman unfortunately has it throughout his, “England as Ideology: From Upstairs Downstairs to Room with a View” chapter in his book The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). The attribution of ITV and Channel 4 shows to the BBC is far too common particularly in the US and may itself deserve critical attention. 

 

5. On the surprise of those involved in Upstairs Downstairs at the success of the show see Jean Marsh, Evin Crowley, and Fay Weldon, Commentary: "On Trial", Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Series One, Network and Acorn and “Upstairs Downstairs Remembered”, Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Series Five, Network and Acorn. On Up Down's popularity see Interview with Jean Marsh, The One Show, BBC 1, 14 December 2010, Jonathan Bignall, An Introduction to Television Studies (London: Routledge, second edition, 2004), p. 56, Jeremy Potter, Independent Television in Britain, Volume Four, Companies and Programmes, 1968-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 75. On Upstairs’s popularity worldwide see “Upstairs Downstairs Remembered”, Upstairs Downstairs, The Complete Series, Acorn, Patty Lou Floyd, Backstairs with Upstairs Downstairs (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), and Jeremy Potter, Independent Television in Britain, Volume Four, Companies and Programmes, 1968-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 75.
Reflective of Up Down’s popularity was how seriously some viewers took the show. Simon Williams, who played James Bellamy, the eldest of the Bellamy children, was attacked by a woman in a supermarket with a handbag for his callous treatment of his formerly middle class wife Hazel during much of the third and fourth series of the show and Karen Dotrice, who played the under housemaid Lily who downstairs butler Mr. Hudson fell in love with in series five, received letters pillorying her for stealing the affections of Mr. Hudson, the butler, from Mrs. Bridges, the cook. Many viewers apparently believed that Mr. Hudson and Mrs. Bridges were meant for each other. On viewers mistaking actors for the characters they play on television see Simon Williams and Meg Wynn Owens, Commentary: "Sudden Impact", Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Acorn and Karen Dotrice, Commentary: "Disillusion", Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Series Five, Acorn and Network. 

 

6. Jeremy Potter, Independent Television in Britain, Volume Four, Companies and Programmes, 1968-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 75. 

 

7. Downton viewership data can be obtained from BARB, the Broadcast Audience Research Board. On Downton’s popularity with viewers in the UK see John Plunkett, “Downton Abbey Scares Spooks with 9m Viewers”, the Guardian, 18 September 2011. On Downton’s global reach see John Heilpern, “Downton Abbey: Escapist Kitsch Posing as Masterpiece Theatre”, the Nation, 8 February 2012 and Richard Brooks, “Frightfully British TV Drama Downton Abbey Wins a Worldwide Audience”, the Australian, 17 January 2013. On Downton’s popularity in the US see "Downton Abbey Season 2 Premiere Doubles PBS Ratings”, Los Angeles Times, 10 January 2012, Scott Collins, “Downton Abbey Season Three Premiere Draws Record Ratings”, Los Angeles Times, 7 January 2013, and Brian Stelter, “No Savior Needed for This Old House”, New York Times, 8 January 2013. On Downton’s popularity in Australia see Staff Writer, “Downton Abbey’s A Surprise Hit”, [Melbourne] Herald Sun, 7 June 2011. On Downton’s success in New Zealand see Brad Kreft, “Downton’s Premiere Proves a Hit for Prime”, Throng: New Zealand’s TV Watching Community, 11 May 2011. On Downton’s global popularity see Jeremy Egner, “A Bit of Britain Where the Sun Still Never Sets: Downton Abbey Reaches Around the World”, New York Times, 3 January 2013.

 

8. On the cultural impact of Downton Abbey see Aimee Lee Ball, “Pass the Tea and the Remote and Put on Your Tiaras”, New York Times, 18 January 2012. On Downton’s impact on bookstores in the US see Julie Bosman, “If You’re Mad for Downton, Publishers Have Reading List”, New York Times, 11 January 2011. On Downton themed watching parties see Jill Radsken, “Dear Abbey: Downton Styles Flourish at Viewing Party”, Boston Herald, 22 January 2012. On the impact of Downton on the fashion world see Lauren Cochrane, “Downton Abbey Inspires the Fashion World”, 31 July 2012, the Guardian. On PBS’s Downton themed jewellry see Emma Brockes, “Downton Abbey to PBS: Knock It Off With the Knockoffs”, the Guardian, 25 January 2012. Carnival, the maker of Downton Abbey, demanded that PBS cease using Downton character names to sell these jewels (Sarah Nathan and Daisy Dumas, “PBS is Forced to Pull ‘Unauthorised’ Downton Abbey Jewellry Line After Show Producers Object”, the Mail Online Online, 25 January 2012, which accuses PBS of engaging in black market practises, it is the Mail after all, and Michael Getler, "The Daily Downton", PBS Ombudsman, 24 January 2012 who notes that PBS obtained the jewellry from a third party. 

 

9. John Caughie attributes the lack of critical interest in “quality” studio costume dramas like Upstairs Downstairs to the fact that they were women’s programmes (Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 207) I think there is something else or something in addition to this going on in the dismissal of theatrical dramas. What I suspect is going on here is that with the rise and impact of mise-en-scene criticism and that theoretical smorgasbord of mix and match social theory from semiotic to structuralist, feminist to psychoanalytic, racist to classist, marxist to cognitive, and phenomenological to hermeneutic theory that has come to dominate film and television theory since the 1960s costume dramas, including those which have been adapted from literary or theatrical works, have come to be seen by many in the journalistic and academic worlds of film and television criticism as elitist, aesthetically regressive, or ideologically regressive and as a result deserving only of dismissive critical attention if they get any critical attention at all.

Whether BBC and ITV costume dramas are elitist or not it is clear that there are problems with painting either the BBC or ITV with such a broad brush since the BBC has broadcast not only adaptations of Jane Austen but also broadcast television shows like Steptoe and Son (1962-1965, 1970-1974), Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, 2005-), and Days of Hope (Ken Loach, 1975), which clearly have a popular if not a populist dimension to them, and ITV has given us Upstairs Downstairs, a show that took its gaze away from masters upstairs to also focus on servants, and that populist adaptation produced by a political refugee from McCarthy era America, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1960). Beyond the issue of elitism and populism one could raise the question of whether the avant-garde and Brechtian television praised by many of critics as disruptive of dominant discourse, TV shows like Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986) for instance, are any less elitist than adaptations of Jane Austen or John Gallsworthy. Additionally, whether a show like Upstairs Downstairs because it is a filmed play has little going on in its mise-en-scene is simply not correct. Great care has been put into creating the mise-en-scene of both upstairs and downstairs in Upstairs Downstairs as I have tried to show in this paper.
I think the reason both Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey have garnered such limited attention from academics beyond the ideological reasons noted above are several. Neither Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey are television programes that seem to stir the academic blood these days. Both are on PBS in the US, a network that has garnered little attention from academe compared to the hundreds of papers and dozens of books on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003) alone, for example. Both aren’t one of the genres that seem to obsess fan scholars or scholar fans such as Doctor Who or Buffy, both of which have generated far more scholarly interest that Up Down and Downton, and neither are American. A quick survey found that 19 of 21 of the monographs in US publisher Wayne State University Press’s “TV Milestones” series are on American television programmes, 21 of 30 books published by British publisher IB Tauris are on American TV series’, and around 90% of the books published by the US publisher McFarland are on American television shows. The British Film Institute’s “TV Classics” series is almost the obverse of Wayne State’s: only 6 of 21 books in the series are on American television shows. British publisher Tauris published a book on Charmed (Stan Beeler and Karin Beeler (eds.), Investigating Charmed: The Magic Power of TV (London: Tauris, 2007), a derivative television show that was on the WB (1998-2006) and which some have referred to as Buffy light, and which is of questionable historical significance, but has not published one on Upstairs Downstairs. What does all of this say about the academic audience that these books are primarily geared towards?  

 

10. Glen Creeber (ed.), Fifty Key Television Programmes (London: Arnold, 2004); Toby Miller’s (ed.), The Television Studies Book (London: BFI, 2002); Glen Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book (London: BFI, 2001); Michelle Hilmes (ed.), The Television History Book (London: BFI, 2003). 

 

11. Colin McArthur, Television and History (BFI, 1978), p. 40; Carl Freedman, The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), pp. 76-80; Catherine Itzin, “Upstairs Downstairs: London Weekend Drama Series", Theatre Quarterly, 6, April-June 1972, pp. 26-38; and Charles Barr, James Hillier, and V.F. Perkins, "The Making of Upstairs Downstairs, a Television Series", Movie, 21 (Autumn 1975), p. 46-63. 

 

12. Rachel Cooke, “Downton Abbey: Heirs and Graces”, 14 October 2010, the New Statesman, Tanya Gold, “Downton Abbey: Class and Distinction”, 13 September 2011, the Guardian, and Simon Schama, “No Downers in Downton: Why Have Americans Fallen For a Show That Serves up Snobbery by the Bucketfuls?”, Newsweek, 16 January 2012, reprinted online in The Daily Beast. For a somewhat feminist reading of Downton Abbey see Amanda Civitello, “A Gilded Cage: A Feminist Critique of the Downton Abbey Christmas Special”, Bitch Flicks, 20 September 2012.

 

13. For an interesting discussion of Upstairs Downstairs classic and Downton Abbey see Gary Holmes, “Downton Abbey Vs. Upstairs Downstairs”, MediaPost Blogs: TV Board, Big Thoughts on the Future of the Small Screen, 31 January 2012. Graeme McMillan, “’I Must Have Said It Wrong’: Decoding Downton Abbey’s Television DNA”, Time, 4 January 2013, notes the similarities between Upstairs Downstairs classic and Downton Abbey.

In yet another battle in the British culture war against the public broadcaster the BBC the right wing Mail Online has published a number of articles claiming that the revived Upstairs Downstairs on the BBC is derivative of the former including Paul Revoir’s "Upstairs Downton...or How the New BBC Period Drama Series Echoes Its Hit ITV Rival", The Mail Online, 31 January 2012. The Mail Online’s claims are rather odd since it is quite clear that Downton is in so many ways, as I have tried to show, a remake of the original Upstairs Downstairs. On the other hand, perhaps The Mail’s claim here is not so odd since the right wing Mail, both in its traditional newspaper form and its online form, has long been known for its opposition to British public television and a purveyor of the notion that the Beeb is a bastion of left wing propaganda. On the ideology of The Daily Mail and The Mail Online see Will Oremus, "The Worlds Most Popular Online Newspaper: How The Daily Mail Took the Title from the New York Times”, Slate, 3 February 2012 and Dean Hardman, “Political Ideologies and Identities in British Newspaper Discourse”, Ph.D, dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2008.

Speaking of the ideology of The Daily Mail and its online Mail Online, The Mail’s Chris Hastings, "Downton Downsized...By Two Hours Because American TV Executives Fear Its Intricate Plot Will Baffle U.S. Viewers", The Mail Online, 7 January 2011, claims that PBS cut Downton by two hours because of fears that Americans would simply not be intellectually able to grasp its intricate plot about the entail. This internet myth (a new area of study for folklorists?) that PBS cut Downton by two hours because of American ignorance is, however, as Jace Lacob points out in his "In Defense of Downton Abbey (Or, Don't Believe Everything You Read)", Televisionary, 3 January 2012, simply false. As Lacob notes the episodes were slightly cut in order to fit Downton into the Masterpiece time slot. Why would The Mail Online make such a claim? It would not, I think, be a stretch to conclude that The Mail Online’s caricature and stereotypes of Americans as semi-literate country bumpkins fits hand in glove with its right wing xenophobia. While all of this, as Oremus suggests, may simply be an attempt by The Mail Online to intrigue and “hook” its targeted female demographic, it also reflects and is consistent with the broader right wing, anti-public television, and xenophobic ideology of its newspaper parent. 

 

14. I haven’t heard Fellowes address these similarities anywhere. It would be nice if someone asked him about them. 

 

15. On the impact of theatre on British television see Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1998) and Jerome Bourdon with Juan Carlos Ibanez, Catherine Johnson, and Eggo Muller, “Searching for an Identity for Television: Programmes, Genres, Formats” in Jonathan Bignell and Andreas Flickers, A European Television History (Oxford; Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), p. 107. Film was also an influence on British television from the very beginning. The American left wing refugee from McCarthyism Hannah Weinstein’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (ITP/ITV, 1955-1959) was shot on film and partly on location. The Avengers (ABC/ITV, 1961-1969) was shot on film and partly on location. The Saint (ITC/ITV, 1962-1969) was shot on film and, if only rarely, on location, Ken Loach’s Up the Junction (BBC, 1964) was shot on film in a somewhat realist documentary style and partly on location. It was Peter Watkins’s War Game (BBC, 1965) and Loach’s Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966) that really took British television into the streets and, in the process, blurred the boundaries between television fiction and documentary fact. On the impact of cinema on British television drama see Lez Cooke; British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 30, 70, 76. On the impact of film on Loach and Loach’s impact on British TV see Graham Fuller (ed.), Loach on Loach (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 9-10. On Weinstein see Tise Vahimagi, “Hannah Weinstein (1912-1984)”, Screenoline. 

 

16. In his writer’s guidelines for Upstairs Downstairs story editor Alfred Shaughnessy wrote that “[t]elevision is electronic theatre and not second-rate film”. “Obituary: Alfred Shaughnessy”, the Telegraph, 14 November 2005. 

 

17. Downton is not the first costume drama to bring an action, commercial, and music video pace and a paring down of dialogue to a minimum to the costume drama. You can see aspects of these in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice and you can see all of them in the 2005 BBC Bleak House. Apparently television viewers today expect minimum dialogue and action pacing in every genre of film and television programmes these days regardless of how appropriate it may be. Speaking of pacing, I recently watched Up Down again for the first time since the 1970’s and have to say that it was a pleasure, for a change, to watch a show which allowed actors to act and scenes to breath, something rare in an American and British film and television landscape increasingly devoted to the cult of jump cutting and limited attention spans. 

 

18. Laurel Ann [Nattress], “Downton Abbey’s Stunning Film Locations”, Austenprose-A Jane Austen Blog, 28 January 2011. On the cinematography of Downton see the interview with one of Downton’s directors of photography David Katznelson, "Downton Abbey: David Katznelson on Using the D-21 to Shoot ITV’s Hugely Successful Period Drama”, ARRI Media. The digital nature of Downton is particularly noticeable in the World War I scenes.

 

19. Helen Wheatley, "Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs and the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s" in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (eds.), ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years (Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2005) p. 147.

 

20. I wouldn’t, by the way, claim that modern digital technologies bring greater realism to the cinema or television. I would, in fact, argue just the opposite, to some extent. In the days before CGI special effects crews blew up real cars and the cars that blew up looked like they really blew up. GGI, on the other hand, simulates cars being blown up. Additionally, digital technologies tend to, though I suspect not intentionally, as when, for instance, scenes have rain falling or soil flying, seem “fake”, quite different from what the human eye sees and experiences. Finally, we all know that the real reason by and large digital film is triumphing over film stock of the past isn’t realism. It is cost. Digital is less costly to shoot on and easier to manipulate. 

 

21. Piers Wenger, "Will Upstairs Downstairs Upstage Downton Abbey?”, the Telegraph, 23 December 2010. Film critic Roger Ebert also argues that class is at the heart of Downton Abbey in his “Think of Me as the Butler, Carson”, the Chicago Sun-Times, 19 January 2012.

 

22. Both Simon Williams and Meg Wynn Owens have said that series four was their favourite. Simon Williams and Meg Wynn Owens, Commentary: “Miss Forest”, Upstairs Downstairs, Complete Series, Network and Acorn. 

 

23. History and scandal remain the central narrative themes and thrusts of the revived BBC Wales Upstairs Downstairs. The revived Upstairs Downstairs has a new cast, save that of Jean Marsh who returns as Rose, and also stars, for the first time, in the first revived series, the other co-creator of the series Eileen Atkins. The revived Upstairs Downstairs, series six, begins in 1936 with new owners of 165 Eaton Place, Sir Hallam Holland (Ed Stoppard) and his wife, Lady Agnes Holland (Keeley Hawes), moving into and restoring the house (“The Fledgling”). The Holland’s hire Rose, who now runs an agency which finds domestic servants for the great houses of Belgravia, to assemble a new staff for 165 Eaton Place. Rose assembles a new staff for the house and eventually joins staff herself becoming 165’s head housemaid. In terms of history the new series is set against the backdrop of the death of George V, the rise of Hitler in Germany, the rise of the British Union of Fascists and Oswald Mosley, rising anti-Semitism, the Edward and Mrs. Simpson scandal, and Edward VIII's abdication in December 1936. Amidst this history Lady Hallam’s younger sister, Lady Persephone (Claire Foy), Lady Persie, has, beginning in the second episode of the revived series (“The Ladybird”), a scandalous relationship with 165’s chauffeur Harry Spargo (Neil Jackson), becomes, like Spargo, enamoured of and involved with the British Union of Fascists, and by the third episode (“The Cuckoo”) allies herself with the German Ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop (Edward Baker-Duly) and the Nazi cause. Politics remains a part of Up Down since Sir Hallam works at the Foreign Office. Series two of the revived Upstairs Downstairs, unfortunately its last, was broadcast in 2012. Unlike Upstairs Downstairs classic the revived Up Down is filmed, highly edited, has scenes of limited duration, and music punctuates each episode. For an excellent discussion of the revived Upstairs Downstairs see Laurel Ann [Nattress], “Upstairs Downstairs 2010: A Triumphant Return to UK Television”, Austenprose-A Jane Austen Blog, 26 December 2010. 

 

24. Fellowes has occasionally commented on the history in some of the details of Downton Abbey. For example, Fellowes notes in an article in the Telegraph that the affair between Lady Mary and Mr. Pamuk was based on an actual historical incident. On this see Andy Bloxham, “Downton Abbey's Turkish Diplomat Sex Scandal ‘Is Not Fiction’”, the Telegraph, 11 October 2011. Dina Copelman explores the historical accuracies and historical inaccuracies in Downton Abbey in her "Real Life History of “Downton Abbey Series Three”, WETA.org, n.d. While this historical discussion of Downton Abbey is interesting it must always be remembered that Downton is a work of fiction not a historical documentary and like almost any work of historical fiction makes use of fictional narrative conventions and has to be judged on that basis.  

 

25. For a discussion of Downton viewership in one American city see Gene Balk, “This Sunday, Will You Be Watching Seahawks or Downton Abbey — or Both?”, Seattle Times, 8 January 2013. Balik notes that according to Scarborough Research 60% of those who watch PBS dramas in general in Seattle are women something a quick and unscientific perusal of the Masterpiece Facebook pages seems to bear out. Similarly, if the Facebook Call the Midwife page is a guide the viewership of that show is primarily female as well. 

 

26. There is a pressing need to do much more research on Downton viewership in all its aspects. I don’t mean the type of research that is far too common and hardly compelling in contemporary Film and Television Studies these days, however, the type of audience research where academics seem to largely construct ideal readers much like Noam Chomsky constructs ideal speakers, which they can then analyse, and critique in straw man fashion. I mean audience research that goes beyond the construction of an ideal watcher. Such research must not only be ethnographic but also statistical. We need, in other words, to collect data about Downton viewership from representative samples of the Downton watching population. Once we ascertain what Downton viewers find in and take from Downton Abbey we can then and only then explore how Downton viewing (and beyond) is constructed and how cultural phenomena like romanticism are constructed. By the way, the tendency amongst Film and Television Studies academics to avoid primary source analysis and statistical research unnecessary or even to disdain it means that their readings of film and television texts are essentially a variety of reader response since invariably one can find another academic with an entirely different perspective on the same text. Some academics find Buffy the Vampire Slayer sexist, other find it feminist, for instance. It is a variety of reader response that tells us much about the social and cultural contexts of contemporary academia. Speaking of intellectual “readings” of Downton Abbey I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these if not most of them break down along ideological lines and that “readings” of Downton in the right leaning Daily Mail vary from those in the liberal and left leaning New Statesman and The Nation, most obviously, and even beyond in the mainstream corporate press. This suspicion, of course, is very much in need of further empirical development and investigation. Empirical audience analysis has not been a major or even minor concern of this paper.
Speaking of audience analysis, since academia is the product of specific historical and cultural formations academic it too is a form of audience analysis particularly when it is not backed up by historical research, interview or archival. Given this we might want to ask about what historical social and cultural factors have made so many academics in thrall to a historical psychoanalysis.

 

27. I am, of course, fully aware that my reading of Downton Abbey must be regarded as tentative given that Downton, at the time of the writing of this paper, is still in production (a fourth series is on the way) and remains, as a result, an open text. So feel free to take my reading of Downton with a grain of salt. 

 

28. Fellowes decision to kill Sybil and Matthew was, one presumes, occasioned by Jessica Brown Findlay’s and Dan Stevens’s decision to leave the show. Sarah Crompton, “Dan Stevens: Why I Left Downton Abbey”, the Telegraph, 26 December 2012.

 

29. Helen Wheatley, "Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs and the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s" in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (eds.), ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years (Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2005) p. 146.

 

30. I am beginning to wonder whether Fellowes has an obsession with body trauma given Downton’s vivid portrayal of the farmer’s dropsy (1:2), Mr. Bates’s leg after he tries to use a device to cure his limp (1:3), Thomas’s hand after it has been shot by a German sniper during WWI (2:1), the death of a solder shot by a German sniper thorough the temple who is talking to Thomas (2:1), the missing limbs of a soldier who Edith is helping (2:3), William’s and Matthew’s injuries suffered at the Battle of Amiens (2:5 and 2:6), “Patrick’s” facial and limb injuries (2:6), Cora’s hemorrhaging (2:8), and the sounds of William, Lavinia, and Sybil dying (2:5, 2:8, and 3:5). 

 

31. James Fenton, “The Abbey That Jumped the Shark", New York Review of Books, 8 March 2012 makes some nice points about the sentimental and soap aspects of Downton and makes some interesting historical points about the programme along the way. 

 

32. Andrew Higson nicely summarises the costume drama as nostalgia for times past perspective in his “Heritage Cinema and Television” in David Morley and Kevin Robins (eds.), British Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 252-257. For a recent example of this paint by the it must be nostalgic because pre-existing theory says it must be far too few numbers see Kristen Hatch, “Downton Abbey and Mad Men: The End of the World as We Know It”, Flow, 5 March 2013. 

 

33. Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, The Symmetrical Family: A Study of Work and Leisure in the London Region (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973), pp 212 and 216. Young and Wilmott found that 97% watched television. The next most popular leisure activity for Britons was gardening at 64%. According to Taylor Downing, The World at War (London: BFI, 2012), p. 3, 18 million British households and 90% of British families had televisions by the 1970s.

 

34. Andrew Higson, “Heritage Cinema and Television” in David Morley and Kevin Robins (eds.), British Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 256-258.

 

35. In her interview with Bob Frost Jean Marsh The HistoryAccess.com Interviews: Upstairs, Downstairs mentions how Up Down played off of the Forsyte Saga (BBC, 1967). Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins also talk about the relationship between the Forsyte Saga and Upstairs Downstairs and the origins of Up Down during a question and answer session at the BFI, Upstairs Downstairs Q&A, BFI, 23 December 2010. Also see Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2003) on the Forsyte Upstairs connection. On Jean Marsh see Elizabeth Grice, “Upstairs Downstairs' Jean Marsh Interview: A Touch of Class Below Stairs”, 16 December 2010, the Telegraph. On Eileen Atkins see, Sally Vincent, “A Class Act”, 9 December 2000, the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2000/dec/09/weekend.sallyvincent.On Alfred Shaughnessy see “Obituary: Alfred Shaughnessy”, the Telegraph, 14 November 2005, and Derek Grainger, “Obituary: Alfred Shaughnessy”, the Guardian, 15 December 2005.On John Hawksworth see “Obituary: John Hawksworth”, 31 October 2003, the Telegraph, , and Philip Purser, “Obituary: John Hawksworth”, 10 October 2003, the Guardian. The comments by cast and crew on Hawksworth’s and Shaughnessy’s contributions to Up Down’s historical veracity can be found interspersed in the commentaries throughout the five series of Upstairs Downstairs on the Network and Acorn completes series DVD collections and particularly in the fourth series commentaries by Rosemary Anne Sisson, Jean Marsh, and Jacqueline Tong for “A Patriotic Offering”, Christopher Beeny, Christopher Hodson, Jean Marsh and Jacqueline Tong for “Women shall not Weep”, Jean Marsh, Meg Wynn Owen (Hazel) and Simon Williams for “The Glorious Dead”, and Jean Marsh, Meg Wynn Owen and Simon Williams for “Peace out of Pain”. 

 

36. Colin McArthur, Television and History (BFI, 1978), p. 40. 

 

37. On Julian Fellowes see Christopher Wilson, “Is This Why Downton's Creator is Obsessed By Class? Julian Fellowes' Ancestors Were Not Masters but Servants on the Estate That Inspired the Abbey”, 26 November 2011, The Mail Online, Mark Sweeney, "Downton Abbey Creator Julian Fellowes to Become Tory Peer", 19 November 2010, the Guardian, and Horacio Silva, “Julian Fellowes”, January 2012, Los Angeles Times Magazine. Tony Rennell’s “Downton’s Dirty Secret: one Former Maid on the Risible Relationship Between the Granthams and their Servants”, The Mail Online, 29 December 2011, explores some of the criticisms that have been made about Downton’s unrealistic portrayal of masters and servants while critic and writer A.N. Wilson criticises Downton creator Julian Fellowes claims that Downton is realistic in his “Is Downton’s Creator the Biggest Snob in Britain?”, The Mail Online, 14 September 2011 arguing that Downton’s depiction of close and almost friendly relationships between masters and servants (Mary and Carson, Mary and Anna, Cora and O’Brien, Robert and Bates) at Downton Abbey are ahistorical. Corina Chocano, “The Upside-Down Appeal of Downton Abbey”, New York Times Magazine, 17 February 2012, argues that Downton Abbey is home to kind of a beneficent and benevolent welfare aristocracism. For historical studies of service see Frank Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of Upstairs, Downstairs Life (London: Hutchinson, second edition, 1984), Siân Evans, Life below Stairs in the Victorian and Edwardian Country House (London: National Trust Books, 2011), Lucy Delap, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University, 2011), and Pamela Cox, Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs, three parts, BBC 2, 2012. James Fenton, “The Abbey That Jumped the Shark”, New York Review of Books, 8 March 2012, notes that employing batmen as valets was sometimes a cover for homosexual attachments.

38. Michael Temple and Michael Witt, The French Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2004), pp. 1-5.
The problem with crystal ball textualism is that it takes what is ultimately a polemical and apologetic position that everything you ever needed to know about a film or a television show is in the text. This is similar, by the way, to fundamentalist approaches of “sacred” religious texts in which they assume that the only thing you need to know about the Bible, the Quran or the writings of Bahaullah is in the Bible, the Quran, or the writings of Bahaullah. Exegetical and hermeneutic tautology. Theoretically, it is possible that crystal ball textualist critics may be right about Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey being must see nostalgia television, the arc of the glazed doughnut, but we can’t really check whether they are right because they give us nothing to check beyond the text, the missing piece at the centre of a glazed doughnut. The problem with this is that critics often come to different conclusions about the same text. Anyway, much more in the way a historical analysis grounded in primary source material is essential if we are to conclude that both Up Down and Downton are nostalgia TV. Now, don’t get me wrong I think the texts of Up Down and Downton Abbey should be an essential part of any analysis, they are primary source documents after all. I am simply suggesting that they should not be the be all and end all of analysis as they so often are in crystal ball textualism. Analysts must go beyond the text to explore the rich primary source material relating to television production and television creation out there in primary source material land in order to place interpretive checks and balanced on what are often unchecked academic hermeneutic speculations. For my take on and critique of crystal ball textualism see Ronald Helfrich, “’Note to Self, Religion Freaky’: When Buffy Met Biblical Studies”, in Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion: The TV Series, the Movies, the Comic Books and More: The Essential Guide to the Whedonverse (London: Titan Books, 2012), pp. 37-48.