Maid in Britain

These days, there's a new twist on the old refrain -

"You just can't get the staff...

"off the screen".

'I think it's a really good question -

'Why are we still so interested'

in this whole world of the domestic servant?

As the cutbacks kicked in, perhaps we've been consoling ourselves

with tales of master and servant, kitchen maids and cooks.

'It's an obvious, simple idea -

The conflict between up and down. And yet, no fisticuffs.

From Forsyte fever in the Swinging Sixties to Downton Abbey in downturn Britain,

why do we keep returning to this Upstairs Downstairs world?

It's escapism, it's nostalgia, it's perhaps how we wish life was now.

I suppose we romanticise it and think, it must have been so wonderful

and you were taken care of from the cradle to the grave.

But is it just escapism or is there a message for modern Britain?

There is something attractive about a world where everyone knew the rules.

I think we all have a sense that nobody knows the rules.

And are we right to look back longingly?

Was the period a golden age?

Well, it depends whether you were holding the gold or you were scrubbing it clean.

2010 saw an unusual event in television drama, as the BBC brought back a classic ITV show

and the cameras returned to 165 Eaton Place.

I don't think it was a really big surprise that Upstairs Downstairs was being revived, retooled.

The past is now television's favourite place

to go and look for future successes.

And this is a narrative that can be very easily updated.

This is for you.

The new one is set in 1936,

so that's six years after we finished.

And so, everything is different, except Rose...

-Welcome home.

-..and the music. Ba da, da dee, da dum.

Together on screen for the first time

were the two women who created the original series, more than 40 years ago.

Eileen Atkins, who should have been in that series,

and who, because of a commitment she had when it first began,

never got her chance, will now be at the heart of the story, where she should be.

So, the two co-creators finally get the places they deserve.

Sir Hallam needs you to stay on at Eaton Place to ensure the proper running of his home.

I told him that I would arrange it and no mother likes to disappoint her only child.

Lady Agnes didn't want a housekeeper. And certainly not me.

She doubtless thought you were ready to be put out to grass.

There is a big part of me that didn't want to do anything with it, ever.

Because, there it was,

one of the most successful series ever.

Should we just leave it as it is?

But, the fact that it was the BBC.

We have experience, you and I.

We're what that house requires.

I trusted Eileen. She trusted me.

It took a long time, but...now it's happened.

Action.

Upstairs Downstairs followed the most talked-about drama of recent times.

Downton Abbey portrayed the life of a grand Edwardian family and the servants who wait on them.

It's odd. This is set just 100 years ago,

yet it seems, in many ways, a remote world.

You know, it's a time when there were different standards,

different manners and I think people maybe enjoy looking at that.

Downton Abbey marked the return of the lush costume drama to commercial television -

and the return of Julian Fellowes to his favourite subject.

Well, Downton Abbey

is another product of my fascination with this

two-tiered way of life, you know,

where a single building contained people with such

different expectations and such different origins and so on.

The upstairs lot in their costumes, they're so beautiful,

-every single one of them.

-Amazing.

-Do you know what I mean?

-We come into work and I get grease

put in my hair, get dirt put under my nails.

I get burns up my arm. I might fancy being a lady up a chaise longue.

-Yeah, just eating all day, it sounds ace.

-Yeah.

You know, every business contains people who have very different social positions,

there's nothing odd in that, but they all go home.

The interesting thing about the servant culture is that they were all in the same home.

Of course, when you're watching it on television,

you have the most beautiful settings.

All one can say is, look at this magnificent castle.

I mean, wouldn't you want to get inside there and have a look round?

Especially to delve into the past and find out what our ancestors might have been doing?

Chances are, at least some of our ancestors were in domestic service.

Britain's army of maids, cooks and cleaners once numbered millions.

And the setting for Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle,

is a perfect example of how the old system worked.

For 300 years, it has been home to the Earls of Carnarvon, though they did have people in.

There were

14-16 footmen, butler, housekeeper. The fifth Earl, for example,

had an excellent French chef, supported by an Austrian patisserie chef.

Domestic service was fantastically important.

It was the scaffolding,

really, of British social life.

-Nursery staff.

-Nursery staff, which was completely separate, so there would be a nanny,

a governess, two or three maids to look after them, a nursery footmen...

By the time you get to the middle and late 19th century, it is the majority employment for women.

Maids in charge of doing all the family's washing and ironing, 25 gardeners, keepers, underkeepers...

It's actually very deep in the English psyche, you know, it's about deference

and belligerence and resentment. And it's about envy.

It's also about ratings. Television realised early on the power of period drama in turbulent times.

The Sixties were ushered in by a book

about a servant that servants weren't supposed to read.

And as at the pace of change quickened, television turned to the past.

Here you are in the late Sixties, the heyday

of Sergeant Pepper, flower-power, hippies,

the Summer of Love and what not.

And one of the most popular shows on British television is this idealised vision of Edwardian England.

In England today, there is no more charming and instructive sight

than an upper-middle-class family in full plumage.

This particular family is called Forsyte and they live in Park Lane.

The Forsyte Saga was the last classic drama made in black-and-white.

That didn't stop it becoming a huge hit,

becoming one of those moments when the nation

were tuned in to watch. It ran for a whopping 26 weeks,

it was a really slow unfolding of the Galsworthy novels.

And beautifully portrayed, beautifully acted.

Galsworthy had written a series of books which could adapt perfectly,

with a death, a marriage and a drama in every single segment.

Therefore, it was absolutely perfect television fodder.

Not a great novel, but wonderful for television.

But critics saw something else behind the Forsyte phenomenon.

If nostalgia would become one of the driving forces

of modern television, was this the start of its golden age?

After all, the whole world is pining for a lost bourgeoisie

and there, on the screen, they can see an image of one,

provided by the BBC.

In other words, there's an awful lot of people in the 1960s who are middle-aged, middle-class, whatever

and they're unsettled by a lot of the changes that have come over Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.

And in the Forsyte saga, they see an older Britain, something that is so reassuring

because it's a hierarchical, organic world,

everybody knows their place, there are no trade unions going on strike, there are no former British colonies

thumbing their nose at the old imperial oppressor. Britain is great.

That was a key element in its success.

It's a very reassuring programme, in an age of anxiety.

Nostalgia, certainly, from the title music onwards and in the shops the claim is that viewers are now

trying to buy a little nostalgia for themselves, Forsyte Saga-style.

Even in black and white, the conventions of the genre were in place.

The early costumes were simply gorgeous, all of the first

12 episodes, because it was the Edwardian period, which is beautiful -

tight waists, bustles, the bosoms up high, your hair beautifully dressed.

I mean, the bit that I was in, all the girls didn't wear bras,

so that we'd look exactly as one would have done in the '20s.

I was very naughty, I wore false eyelashes and I shouldn't have done.

Yet for all the attention to detail, something was missing.

This servants simply had to serve. And stand. And wait.

Mr and Mrs Anthony Smythe.

The gaze is kept the same.

We are looking at the upper echelons of the society.

We don't really find out who makes all the cake that these people eat

and the focus is very much upon the people who get to sit in the comfy seats.

Mr Forsyte is here, madam, in the drawing room.

Oh, thank you, could you take these?

It was a world where money was God, where there was actually an upstairs and a downstairs,

but we didn't concentrate particularly on the downstairs,

because the upstairs story was the main story.

And yet every single part was so good that, even if you had a small part,

you knew what that part was going to be and you knew it would be small,

so you wouldn't be crumbling, you'd just be so thrilled to be in The Forsyte Saga.

If the actors knew their place,

so, too, did the servants they portrayed.

For centuries, domestics had been seen, but rarely heard.

I think it's been a hugely hidden history.

I think, because, partly, it's been about women.

I think, too, that it's always been seen as a private matter.

It's familial and that's one of the reasons why it wasn't really written about very much.

But as black and white gave way to colour,

a new series would open the doors on a world The Forsyte Saga had only hinted at.

The Forsyte Saga was a little bit why Eileen and I wanted to write

something like Upstairs Downstairs, because, we thought, "That's all

"very well, but I would quite like to know who washes that blouse?

"And when all the food goes downstairs that isn't eaten, is the cook angry?"

Originally, we wrote about downstairs,

because that was where we came from. We both had chips on our shoulders.

We didn't really want to give too much airtime to upstairs,

but we had to serve somebody, the servants had to serve somebody, so it became Downstairs Upstairs.

From the moment they explained the concept,

which was to take a London house at the height of the Edwardian season

and remove the front and see what happened, like a doll's house,

it just sounded wonderful.

Yes, it did sound very exciting. Charlotte's right,

because when you've got dramas that involved

both sides of the green door, I mean, people would have to watch, wouldn't they, you know?

LWT didn't think it had a future at all.

It was stuck away on a graveyard slot, late on a Sunday night,

10.15, I think, after the news - a place where it was expected to curl up and die.

No rest for the wicked.

But Upstairs Downstairs tapped into the great British obsession with social class.

-You rang, my lady?

-Oh, yes, Hudson, close the door, will you?

-My lady.

There's a fascination with a stratification of people and what they were doing

in that period and it was all fixed that this type of person only did that for their life,

another one was doing that and how they interacted.

That's what's the human interest in that story.

There is this class obsession, but I think it was more...

I think the English have always had this great sense of history, which unfortunately, I think is dying

quite rapidly, nowadays, but then, audiences were finding out popular history through drama

and they were astonished by what these plays showed them.

-Come on, get up, it's half-past five!

-Oh, Alfred, I'll kill you!

Where am I?

You're in Mr Bellamy's House, in the servant's quarters, where else?

And it's time to get up.

Upstairs Downstairs brought the past to a mass audience,

but how it realistic was its portrayal of life below stairs?

It was extremely hard work and I've worked myself

a day starting at six in the morning and going on to two the next morning.

That means 20 hours, continuously.

Mrs was very strict, because she expected to see the whole height

of the furniture reflected in the parquet floor

and if... Well, there was many a time where you hear, "Mary!

"Come here and bring your duster!"

At Wynyard Park, which is the country house of the Marquess of Londonderry,

I wore one of those pedometers

and I clocked 18 miles in one day without going outside the house.

'Oh, it was hard work, even for Rose, who was the head house parlour maid. So you got up'

in a very, very cold attic and went down to a very, very hot kitchen

and you were doing things like cleaning out the grates.

There's a chapter in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management,

I think it's called, "Up at six, black all grates".

Take these up to the dressing room, give the trousers a final brush before you lay them out.

Remember, that waistcoat is white and must remain white. Look sharp, the carriage is ordered for 8am.

'I think there's a ring of truth in Upstairs Downstairs,'

in so far as it captures a kind of built in deference.

-Everybody's looking up to somebody else.

-The butler

is at the top, partly because he's male,

but also because he holds the most senior position.

Then the housekeeper, then the cook...

-You've forgotten the footman.

-Don't they come after cook?

Below the butler is the valet, who looks after his Lordship, looking after his clothing,

brushing them, polishing them, making sure that all the collars are prepared and laying out his clothes.

Then the menials, there would be the maids, who would be divided into personal maids, household maids...

Don't forget, a grand woman in Edwardian times would never dress herself.

She would have her clothes taken off her and then put on her.

You then have got the senior footman.

Footmen have a very easy life, perhaps, compared with some, because they're front of house

and they have to look beautiful and smart and appear at the front door, open the door to everyone.

Women NEVER opened doors.

-The lowest of the lowest was the scullery maid, I suppose, wasn't she?

-Yes.

That was the lowest you could get. Poor Emily was scullery, wasn't she?

-I think so.

-She was bullied by everybody.

-Yeah.

You put salt into the sugar jar, that's what you've done!

-Oh, no, I never. That was never...

-All that work for nothing!

As well as documenting the hard life and the rigid hierarchy,

these films shed light on the human consequences of the class divide.

Emily committed suicide. She died for love.

She was told she couldn't see the servant next door.

Huh! Emily!

We took a little Irish girl, very simple and everything, who falls in love with this

little handsome boy, who's part of another household, and the mistress that he works for, she also wants

him as her toyboy, so obviously, he goes with her and this breaks the little maid's heart and so on.

But what it really is about is that you actually didn't have the ability to have any sort of relationship.

No, the right to romance, you couldn't have a romance.

The whole area of romance and sex,

which I am old enough to think belong in the same category,

is all to do with proximity and obviously, everyone is living cheek-by-jowl.

There's the physical proximity and, for a dramatist, in a way, that's a dream.

We have had to consult Sir Geoffrey Dylan and discover what your legal position is.

If sex between servants was frowned on, relationships between the classes were even more troubling.

-How could you do this?

-Too late for tears now, Marjorie.

James has involved us in what may well become a major scandal.

It was not considered appropriate for the son of a big house

-to marry a housemaid, were there to have been an activity.

-Come in, Sarah.

Maybe the position of the son of the house was such that

the housemaid weakened and something happened, it caused problems.

Now listen, Mister,

I'm not going to be stuck away in some rotten cottage

with people I've never seen my life before...

Sarah, everything possible is being done for your welfare and comfort.

I think you must remember that.

Sit down, Sarah.

No class could accommodate pregnancy in an unmarried girl

and if it happened and if she couldn't get a man to marry her PDQ,

then her whole life left the road. If she was the daughter of an earl, she would be married off to some

suspicious foreigner and have to go off and live in Rimini or some ghastly town near Utrecht

and hardly be seen again. If she was a servant, she'd be desperate to marry anyone who would offer.

The family would do everything they could to confine the house maid

somewhere safe, but away, where she would be looked after.

She'd have her child, the child would probably be adopted and no-one would say a word.

But if the hours were long and the rules so strict, why would anybody do it?

It's hard to think about service without remembering

that it was part of a Christian society and that the ideal of service is there across the board.

You know, think of the Civil Service, the colonial service, the services,

as people used to call the army, navy and so on.

May the Lord bless our endeavours and grant us conciliation

to that rank in which, in his infinite mercy, he has seen fit to place us.

It must look, to a post-deferential society, as quite mad to have lived in a time of great deference,

but in those days, there was a sense of where your place was, a reassurance in that.

Now, we've completely lost that, which makes it impossible to imagine, "Yes, I'm going to be your butler,

"I'm going to go your bring a copy of The Times and a boiled egg and a cup of tea in the morning."

We've moved to a world where nobody does that for anybody else, nobody tells me what to do.

-Amen.

-Amen.

Upstairs Downstairs captured a conservative time, but whose side were they on?

Upstairs Downstairs breaks new ground and reflects a kind of Marxist scholarship and the new history

that looks at history from below and the lives of the oppressed.

The people who, previously, in films and television, would never have spoken -

they would have just been extras, circulating around the table -

but in Upstairs Downstairs, they're at the heart of the drama, so on the one hand,

it's an oddly radical piece of television and yet, of course,

it's as conservative as the others.

This wasn't a drama arguing in favour of the uprising from downstairs,

of them smashing up upstairs and turning over the furniture in the drawing room.

It's not If. If Lindsay Anderson had made Upstairs Downstairs, it would have been a very different proposal

and I think that shows something about the relative conservatism

of the TV audience, the Sunday night TV audience, particularly.

We had always seen it as a little bit more political and maybe not quite so many babies and romance,

but, then, it wouldn't have been Upstairs Downstairs.

You're watching Upstairs Downstairs, if you can, if there's not a power cut,

during the days of the three-day week and the miners' strikes of the '70s.

I mean, this is the perfect reassuring, romantic, patriotic entertainment.

By the time it ended in 1975, the show had established ITV as a player

in the cut-throat world of costume drama, by creating not just characters, but archetypes.

I got on the bus, literally, a few days ago, and a woman stood up for me and said, "Sit down."

She was Spanish, I think. She said, "I insist.

"I would always give my seat to Rose.

"You work so hard." I said, "That's very sweet."

She said, "I am in service."

I said, "Where?" She said, "Here, in Chelsea."

I said, "Oh, really?"

"Yes, yes, in fact", she said, "We lost our Mrs Bridges."

I said, "Wait a minute, you lost your cook, you mean?"

She said, "We always refer to it like that.

"We are looking for a Mrs Bridges.

"If we needed a new butler, we'd say

"we must go to the employment agency and get a new Mr Hudson."

I thought, "Wow, this is so strange!"

Upstairs Downstairs marked a turning point.

Some of the best-loved characters of '70s television would now come from below stairs.

The success of Upstairs Downstairs meant it was inevitable that other shows of that ilk would follow.

Now it was easier for commissioners to see that that sort of programme may have had success.

Upstairs Downstairs itself gets its own spin-off series, Thomas and Sarah.

Later on down the line, there's The Duchess Of Duke Street.

Oi!

Upstairs Downstairs was very much the model for it.

In fact, if you weren't paying attention too much and just looking

at the surfaces of these series, it would be quite easy to mistake one for another.

-Have you been long in service?

-Yeah, I have, ma'am.

My mother took me away from school when I was 12 and put me into service.

I've done everything, really - scullery maid, kitchen maid,

scrubbing girl and cook, of course, the last year or two.

But there is a difference. Whereas 165 Eaton Place had been

a fictional address, The Duchess Of Duke Street was based on a real person.

The Duchess of Duke Street plugs into a legendary figure, who ran a hotel on Jermyn St.

Rosa Lewis, she was a royal mistress, she had all kinds of connections

with the royal world and yet, she was a rather mouthy

and vulgar and fantastically indiscreet working-class woman.

It's a gift of a character, really, played so well by Gemma Jones, with a real steak knife quality.

I want to get by by working for the best people there is - rich people, lords and ladies who have big houses

and jewels and lovely clothes and the best food. And I want to see it all and be part of it.

You know what they say, rub against gold, a bit may stick to you.

But television would often soften historical fact, to oblige its audience.

It never told the truth

because the situation which it was based on was actually much naughtier.

The young upper-class men

were allowed to come to her house and really behave quite as they wanted to.

She was barred from The Ritz, because it was too embarrassing for her to be there.

She knew everybody there and she would greet them in the most embarrassing and vulgar kind of way -

"Hello, old cock", this sort of thing.

The success of shows like Upstairs Downstairs and The Duchess Of Duke Street

awoke a new interest in the lives of real servants.

What had once been a secret history now went primetime and some servants even became celebrities.

It was a time when those women felt able to look back.

They were in their 70s, a number of them, they were the last generation, often, of live-in servants

and it became OK to reflect on having been a servant.

-Mrs Everage...

-Dame Edna, thank you!

I'm terribly sorry. When I was a cook in service,

the son of the house forged a cheque

in his father's name.

He was sent to Australia and they paid him £2 a week to keep him out there.

-And he got the parlour maid pregnant before he went.

-He what?

He got the parlour maid pregnant before he went.

Every other Sunday, we used to take her to Hyde Park

and make her jump off a bench, but it never did any good.

LAUGHTER

Most domestic servants had been women, but the dominant figure below stairs was male.

The butler would become an iconic on-screen figure.

ALAN WHICKER: There are two dozen ways of folding a napkin,

but there are only two ways of announcing lunch. The wrong way...

Grub is up.

..and the right way.

Luncheon is served, sir.

Soon, the butler was ubiquitous - and not just in drama.

At times, it seemed every television presenter in Britain

was contractually obliged to give it a go.

The idea behind In At The Deep End

was to give us an insight into a world that we wouldn't

normally be able to get into.

And our access all areas ticket was we would have a go at the job

and one of the ones we did was butler.

You rang, my lord?

Oh, yes.

Nearly midday... People playing tennis, I'm sure they're thirsty.

-Can we have Pimm's out on the balcony here in about half an hour?

-With pleasure, my lord.

-Thank you.

The butler's role is to lead the below stairs team

and to be right-hand man of his master.

He can pass from below stairs to upstairs, to go and see the family, as and how he chooses.

He's highly trusted by the family.

Our first port of call, almost, was Ivor Spencer's School of Butlery.

He was sort of training up Jeeves-like figures, genuinely and properly, how to be butlers.

That's the idea. Very good.

That's the pace. That's the pace to walk around the house, always.

It was his proud boast in latter years, and actually said on his website,

"I train butlers, but I did NOT train Paul Burrell."

-ALL: My lords, ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served.

-Perfect.

He took it so seriously. He said, "Well, of course, Serle, you must understand that there

"are a certain number of phrases which you must remember".

Certainly, sir. No problem.

It's a pleasure.

Those are the words that will get you the world.

He holds this extraordinary position.

He is a presence in the house, more than almost his master.

We tread a thin line between being respectful,

but never being subservient.

We hear and see everything in the household,

but everything we hear and see, of course, we don't always hear and see.

It's extremely important that, as a butler, you have loyalty, discretion and honesty.

When we'd go and interview these butlers, these lofty butlers,

"I'm going to learn to be a butler in six weeks," they would say, "Oh..."

It's impossible, actually.

For six weeks, you couldn't become a butler,

I'm afraid. It takes two years to train a footman

and another two years, at least, for him to become a butler,

to have the knowledge required. I wish you luck.

Domestic service was probably seen as one of the great apogees of life for the working man or woman.

If you could get yourself a place in one of the grand houses

and make your way up, become either a housekeeper or a butler, you had really achieved in life.

What we used to do was to open it out right at the middle

and run a line of stitching up there

and then press it out flat

with a warm iron.

The service was so good and so luxury.

It seems bizarre, but to them, nothing was too good for these unbelievably wealthy people.

That is how you used to present the newspaper to the gentleman or the lady.

The ladies, of course, they had a little perfume ironed into the paper.

They really were spoilt in those days, weren't they?

Absolutely spoilt. It was the art of gracious living.

The fifth earl had a house steward butler called Fearnside.

His valet was Fearnside and his butler was Streatfield.

Once they joined, they never left.

And apparently, he was just wonderful to work for.

You tried to pass the position on to your son or your nephew or cousin,

so it was quite a tight-knit community.

With butlers, with housekeepers, with ladies' maids, especially,

and with valets, in many cases, very strong relationships grew up.

I think you'd have to ask His Grace whether he'd consider me a friend.

-You regard him as one?

-Oh, yes.

You couldn't have a valet you didn't like.

You couldn't undress in the room with somebody you couldn't stand.

Ever friendly enough to call each other by your Christian names?

No, of course not!

That's too ridiculous. It really is.

The bond between master and servant or mistress and servant is always idealised.

It's always been idealised and always been complained about.

There have been complaints about bad servants since service began.

You can find it even in medieval times, people moaning, "Serfs aren't what they used to be."

We'll have some port, which, of course, does need rather careful handling.

-It's '65...

-Right.

-..and it's frightfully good.

We tried to end up with a big event at the end of the film.

-May I've your name, please?

-Princess Du Chemie.

-Princess Du Chemie.

We had a weekend house party at Ragley Hall,

the home of the Marquis of Hertford.

-It could be a little colder, but I don't think we can do anything about it now?

-I don't think so.

The aristocrats we were dealing with were utterly charming, but when I was serving the drinks,

it was quite clear that you were as important to them as the wallpaper.

My lords, ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served.

My feelings about that world were that it's amazing that there is still this hierarchy,

there is still this old-fashioned approach to upstairs and downstairs, them and us, master and servant.

It's endlessly fascinating to people, and I suppose again, is it because

we hanker after a way of life which has disappeared?

Do we quite like the idea of being a part of that, just for a few seconds? I don't know.

But when you don't mix socially, where could be working and upper classes meet?

The answer was in the classifieds.

For the last 125 years, The Lady has been THE place where

upper crust, Grade One-listed households will advertise

for all their domestic employment needs.

We're a place where the domestic class meets the upper class and, as such, we are,

I think, a very unique institution in this world of upstairs, downstairs.

We are, in a way, the staircase which connects upstairs and downstairs.

The Lady provided unwitting inspiration for one of the most

fondly-remembered dramas of the '80s.

At the station I was in a terrible rush, late as usual,

grabbed a magazine from the WH Smiths or wherever,

and in the back of this mag were lots of adverts for nannies,

people wanting to be nannies, people looking for nannies,

and it occurred to me what a very interesting situation being a nanny must be,

because you're looking after the most precious people in the household,

but you're not their mother and you're not actually a relative, either.

You're just a stranger in a house doing a hugely important job.

If the butler had been the patriarch of the downstairs world,

here was the strange story of the surrogate mother.

Nannies were important, but they were also people who separated themselves,

who didn't see themselves as servants.

-Yes?

-Nurse Gray.

I've come to commence my duties.

The entrance which you require is around the side.

I'm sorry, but I do not intend entering my place of employment through the servants' entrance.

They felt themselves to be part of the household,

although they usually dined with the children in the nursery.

They wouldn't sit down with their employers, so they had this strange twilight existence,

someone who was kind of semi-genteel, who floated between those two worlds

and felt at home in neither.

I've bought the nanny up to see you, my lady.

-Brought, Dorothy.

-Thank you, my lady.

Poor nanny has to get on well with the mother, primarily,

which is a tricky area, because you have another female, unrelated to you,

potentially a threat to your marriage, who is potentially going to take your children's affections.

So the nanny is, I think, it's a very, very tough gig.

The first job that Nanny had, she went to, I think, it was Lady Cheddon.

What did you say your name was again?

-Barbara

-Gray. Really?

Well, we call all our nannies by our last name here, you see.

Always have done. it's a sort of thing.

So if one was to work for us, one would be known as Nanny Cheddon.

Nannies had to adopt the names of the people they worked for,

which was like robbing them of their identity, almost.

Cheerio, old chap.

Mummy and Daddy going out, Nanny?

Mummy and Daddy are going away, old chap.

They won't be away long, just a couple of days.

We're away all week, Nanny. It's Ascot week.

She was a strong girl herself.

She'd not let her children suffer

through the negligence of the parents.

They hardly ever saw their mother and father.

That's an aristocratic idea.

The aristocracy have always been extremely comfortable with distant, glacial relationships.

The idea that you should actually touch your children,

or even see them very often, has been viewed as a kind of perversion by the aristocracy for generations.

The belief, really, was that your children should sort of occupy

their own space and develop in their own space, and the modern thing,

that you've got to be, sort of, staring at your child all the time -

"Who are your best friends?" and "Let's do the homework now" - I think is quite oppressive.

Actually, I think it's a very good thing to have a nanny.

If everyone could afford a nanny, I'd like them to have a nanny,

simply because I think the mother should be the glamorous, glorious, wonderful person

they go to with all their troubles, not the strict disciplinarian. The nanny does that.

The relationship between a child and their nanny was often hugely important.

So, in the, sort of, memoirs of aristocratic politicians or something,

you'll often see they're very heavily indebted to them, emotionally.

Churchill loved his nanny far more than his mother.

I think a lot of children loved their nannies best.

There was a huge response to this series.

I had hundreds of letters from girls saying, "I want to be a nanny.

"How can I go about being a nanny?"

I actually got a letter from one of the big nanny schools, Norland's,

saying, "We're having so many applications since Nanny has been on and thank you

"so much for thinking up the idea and for doing the show".

Butlers and footmen floundered, but the nanny would thrive into the '80s -

and not simply due to the success of the TV series.

As the women's movement - I don't know what you call it now - advanced

and, quite properly, they started to have careers in traditionally male areas,

the penny dropped that this was either a choice of being childless or having help with your children.

So there was a kind of rethink in this whole thing in our own society, and suddenly day care centres,

nannies, all of these things became acceptable and from acceptable, they graduated to desirable.

The nanny was perceived as being the preserve of

the upper middle classes, a figure of the past, really.

The Queen had a nanny, Prince Charles had a nanny,

anybody with a silver spoon in their mouth had a nanny,

but nobody on your street would have had a nanny.

That has changed now.

I think that's to do with people feeling less ashamed and embarrassed,

less anxious about the idea of not seeing their children very often.

Nanny was one of a slew of shows that eased us

into another decade of rapid change, once again looking backwards.

But if the battle for viewers would be won in the stately homes of England, was this the decisive blow?

One of the great successes of ITV, of course, is Brideshead Revisited,

an incredibly lavish,

beautifully shot piece that looks for all the world like a BBC production and, in fact,

in many areas of the world, like the States, they do think it's a BBC production.

Well?

Well?

What a place to live in.

There is a moment when it seems that the British public,

after years of having watched quite a lot of gritty stuff -

police dramas, tough television, really -

are now in the mood for something vast

and beautifully photographed and full of pictures of stately homes

and of winsome young men looking dreamily into the middle-distance.

Yes, yes, can we hear what the thing is about?

It looks at the world of the aristocrat

and what seems, on the surface, to be this perfect, idyllic world, one that we'd all aspire to.

It soon becomes apparent that not all is well.

I want you to meet Nanny Hawkins. That's what we've come for.

Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited

out of a very strong nostalgic instinct that he had

about an English Catholic aristocracy, that he sensed were fading away

and probably didn't ever really exist in the way that the book invites us to imagine that they do.

In the '80s, that idea is sort of back.

Don't forget, Mrs Thatcher has come in in 1979 and she is, in a sense,

a kind of Brideshead politician, in that she's the first politician

in modern history to come in explicitly promising to turn the clock back.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony...

Not forward. She's not Harold Wilson, "I'm going to build a brave new world,"

she's saying, "The best days were behind us and we can recapture them by going back to them."

And that, I think, goes hand in hand very nicely with this vogue for nostalgia.

But for all its talk of Victorian values, the '80s were the nadir of domestic service,

a brash decade in which the gentleman's gentleman all but disappeared,

and noblesse oblige became a couple of dirty words.

Before the war, 30,000 families in Britain could boast a butler.

Today there are reckoned to be only 70,

and they're working mostly in royal households or for City institutions.

Of course, the rot had set in long before Waugh published his iconic novel.

Death, duties and Labour governments would leave even the Sixth Earl of Carnarvon making cutbacks.

It was harder to do things in the same way

as it used to be.

Costs had gone up a lot, there was inflation, much higher taxation,

especially in the '60s and '70s,

so although he still had a cook and a butler and a valet, and very few people cleaning, and a gardener...

-Chauffeur.

-It was down.

Instead of being 40, 50 people, it was down to less than 10, so there was a big shrinkage.

The house was quite quiet in those days.

It seemed the game was up, and hard-pressed aristocrats bit the bullet.

The stately homes of England threw open their doors to the public, with spectacular results.

There seems to be an insatiable curiosity about that far off way of life.

People loved going to see how the other half lived.

TV was once more on hand to capture the nuances of Britain's shifting class system,

portraying the plight of the distressed gentry in a string of dramas and sitcoms.

I think the fallen member of the aristocracy has been a rich vein of comedy.

If you look at To The Manor Born, in which Penelope Keith's character

is widowed at the start, and finds herself having to leave the grand house.

Goodbye, Millie. If there's one thing I've taught you, let it be

that you don't open tins of instant coffee with the best silver.

Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, with two small Fs, was displaced from her grand pile

by this arriviste, played by Peter Bowles, who is Polish, probably Jewish,

which is an interesting vibe that the story has,

But he's a frozen-food magnate - he's made his money out of peas and fish fingers,

which is something that Penelope Keith's character can never quite disguise her contempt for.

The estate is simply in trust for your lifetime.

You're responsible for the continuance of its heritage, its traditions and its customs.

-That includes the Pony Club gymkhana?

-Most certainly.

You have an obligation to the people who live here. It's called noblesse oblige.

I can't expect you to have heard of that. It's an English expression.

As the Upstairs Downstairs world became ever more remote,

television found it harder to take it seriously.

Your sweet, my lady.

Oh, thank you.

So increasingly it was played for laughs.

Your nuts, my lord.

Cheeky swine. How am I supposed to open these?

Your crackers, my lord.

But perhaps the comic potential of the master-servant relationship had been there from the start.

Among the funniest books written in the English language are Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster.

Undoubtedly hysterically funny and difficult to bring to television.

Been tried number of times.

In the '60s, it was considered the definitive performance

with Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster and Dennis Price as Jeeves.

I invested him with a sl-slight speech hesitation.

I knew a man in the army very well, a peer of the realm who was my major

for a certain while, and he had this hesitation.

I couldn't call it a stutter, but he seemed absolutely right,

and I thought this man, although physically was not right for Bertie,

th-this was a ve-very good idea for him.

That ca-can't be him, can it, Jeeves?

He'll be considerably ahead of his appointed time, were it Sir Humphrey, sir.

Well, people are, you know, Jeeves.

They le-leap out of bed at some unearthly hour like eight or nine

and find extra ti-time on their hands and nothing to do with it.

I had a very good innings with 13 episodes...of Bertie.

I felt the audience had got used to Bertie getting in a hell of a pickle.

Along came Jeeves and got him out of it. End of story.

When it was heard that Fry and Laurie were taking over the roles,

I think people were a bit surprised,

worried they wouldn't do it justice, but they got the dialogue,

they got the style, they got the relationship just right.

Are you quite comfortable, sir?

Do you know, Jeeves, I jolly well am, yes. This might catch on.

In that case, I shall turn to the hotel, sir, and continue with our ironing.

Jeeves is perfect. He can do no wrong,

he always has the solution to every problem.

-What about Bluebottle for the next?

-I think not, sir.

The animal was standing at sixes at last night's call over and has since lengthened to 15-2.

So it seems likely that something untoward is known.

The fact that they're stuck in this time warp of late '20s, early '30s, is perfect.

It's actually a perfect microcosm of what people wanted England of that time to be.

The conventions of domestic service were satirised less fondly by the sitcom maestros Croft and Perry.

The inspiration for You Rang, M'Lord?

came from the fact that my grandfather was a gentleman's gentleman.

He was a very posh butler to Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane.

My dad used to tell me constant stories about his father and the tough, hard life they had.

Well, they're the upper classes. We have to make allowances.

You make allowances.

As far as I'm concerned, their allowances are cut off.

Their days are numbered. I'm in it for what I can get and I advise you to do the same.

Here was an unsentimental view of life below stairs.

The butler was always on the take with the local butcher,

fishmonger, taking his bit, and there was an enormous amount of corruption.

Now, my dear friend Rosemary Anne Sisson,

who wrote Upstairs Downstairs,

said to me when she first saw the series You Rang M'Lord?, "Oh, Jimmy, it's awful.

"You were so cruel about those people."

-Dad, that's stealing.

-No, it's not. I'm going to pawn it.

I said, "Rosemary, it was a tough, tough life. It was corruption from start to finish."

-You've pawned it?

-I wanted a few quid for a week or two.

Taxi drivers say, "Oh, they were the good old days. You write about the good old days".

They weren't the good old days at all.

Do you know what my ambition is? I'm going to walk in that dining room

where they're all poshed up, drinking port and cracking nuts and going on about the working class,

and I want to say, "Excuse me, m'lord, thwwwrrtt!"

The world of deference ended

because people became more confident in themselves

and were enabled, and they were given the vote and they were listened to,

and people's opinions became more and more important and there was also a great change

in the nature of the working man and woman and his and her role in society.

I think it was definitely the effect of the wars, the two world wars.

Women went out to work.

They went to work in munition factories and they did men's jobs, and I think gradually

the idea of working in big houses and being talked down to by the lady of the house,

that went out the window. They didn't want to do that any more.

And I don't blame them, frankly!

The other thing was, which most people don't acknowledge,

is a lot of it was quite boring

for the upper classes as well.

I remember my grandmother telling me that you had to dress five times a day,

by the time you'd got into walking things

and things for the guns and things for lunch and afternoon dresses and tea gowns and ball gowns...

Your whole life was spent in your bedroom having your wretched maid unhook you down the back.

That must have been in the end tiring when they didn't quite know why they were doing it.

Does domestic service exist nowadays? No, not really.

-Would you say? Doesn't at all, does it?

-No, and also...

It's all got strange, hasn't it?

With health and safety, you daren't ask somebody to pick up a duster in case they sneeze.

Mrs Bridges will kill me!

Try and get somebody to clean an oven nowadays. Impossible!

You have now an oven-cleaning service that comes in a van and says "oven clean".

-They do do it right.

-Yes, but you see nobody wants to clean an oven now.

If you ask somebody who is your cleaning domestic help, "Can you clean an oven?"

-They say, "I don't do ovens."

-That has always been the joke.

-Skills have gone.

Introducing Mable, the robot housemaid...

How to replace the skills of the domestic servant

had been one of the great preoccupations of the 20th century.

Begin the day with able Mabel.

She'll wake you at your pre-set time.

She'll bring your morning tea, brewed just how you like it.

Eventually we found a solution.

Women could do the work with a few labour-saving devices.

What you have in the 1920s and 1930s is the kind of development of a cult of the housewife, if you like.

We always think of the housewife now as something very conservative,

but then the housewife was seen as modern.

The housewife was somebody who did stuff for herself, she didn't rely on other people.

She was a kind of democratic figure.

She was somebody who had at her fingertips all this new technology that she controlled.

It was always a bit of a myth, of course.

It's more of a myth now that housewives have died out.

Women work and nobody does the housework.

It was time for television itself to step up to the plates and fill the vacuum.

Cooking, cleaning, nannying - the traditional servant skills -

formed the basis

of the most popular factual programmes of the new century.

Anthea Turner is the girl next door.

But living next door to this girl would turn most neighbours green with envy.

Her sparkling home is perfect in every way.

Now she's prepared to share the secrets of housekeeping,

home-making and hostessing with two less-gifted housewives.

All of those jobs that we see Jean Marsh, Wendy Craig, Pauline Collins doing

in the fictional TV of the '70s and '80s are performed by real people

who seem strangely fictional in themselves in our current television.

Supernanny is a far less convincing character than Wendy Craig in Nanny,

and yet she seems, Jo Frost, to be a real person.

We look to these kinds of programmes for inspiration,

and because we think they'll help us create the perfect house.

You've got all the things here to deal with the stains.

I want you to use them and I want you to get rid of these stains here.

What they reflect is a sense that skills are still very important.

We don't have domestic servants

and of course we are working so hard now, we're so harassed,

but we're under such pressure to have a perfect house

and to have the world around you that you can only create with the aid of an army of 40 servants.

-And they're off.

-No rest for the wicked.

Then, just as we began to tire of shows about dusting,

drama rediscovered the Upstairs Downstairs world,

Downton Abbey proving its enduring popularity and perhaps continuing relevance.

There's a sort of curious belief among media folk

when they talk about the class system as if this is something in the past,

that it no longer makes any difference.

Of course, it makes an enormous difference.

Do The Times first, he only reads that at breakfast. And The Sketch for her Ladyship.

This was ITV's most successful period drama since Brideshead Revisited,

even if some critics did dismiss it as toff TV.

Julian Fellowes is an observer of the snob, and who I think is also one of our leading apologists for snobbery.

I think he sees it as a kind of virtue in a way,

and he's a very good-humoured about it and he's funny about it,

but I think at the heart of his work, there is a sense that actually these are the best sort of people.

The British upper classes are... either evil

or ridiculous in all television drama.

I think this is not only unhealthy but dishonest.

On Dr Clarkson's recommendation,

I'm sending you up to London to see an eye specialist at Moorfields.

Anna will go with you and you'll stay with my sister Rosamund in her new house in Belgrave Square.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit in your presence, my lord.

One element we have rather lost is the interdependence of the classes.

That society ran on interdependence, and I think that that has gone from our society.

For whatever reason, Downton Abbey seemed to resonate through modern Britain,

with its depiction of an ordered society on the brink of disaster.

This Edwardian period, which is coming at the end of the Victorian splendour of the British Empire,

is a time of great indulgence.

And yet there's always a sense that around the corner something is lurking that will change everything.

Can I ask for silence?

Because I very much regret to announce

that we are at war with Germany.

Of course, war didn't mean the end of the English aristocracy.

Take Highclere. Since opening to the public,

it's played home to Jeeves and Wooster, the orgy scenes in Eyes Wide Shut,

even the wedding of glamour model Jordan -

all proof that our old aristocracy can flourish alongside the new.

It's a bit of escapism, which is very nice when you're facing going to work in an office on Monday.

People love the idea of all this drama taking place

in and around a beautiful building and setting as Highclere.

It's an incredible shock to me to go back to 165 Eaton Place.

Rose becomes the housekeeper...

Everybody touch their toes.

'..and definitely getting tougher...'

And stand up again.

You may leave the room.

..because the servants are tougher to keep under control.

Once again, the action takes place against a backdrop of momentous national events.

1936 is a highly inflammable year.

It's absolutely amazing.

There were three kings, and there were riots in the East End, Mosley blackshirts...

Quite a lot of nobles were fascists, so it's a fantastic year to start it.

Yet, as ever, it's the domestic detail that keeps us watching.

I tried to remember how I learned from Mrs Bridges and Mr Hudson,

and that I was perfectly capable of doing it, so I'm capable of doing it now.

And in this Upstairs Downstairs world, there's one final irony -

it turns out reports of the death of domestic service have been greatly exaggerated.

The back pages of The Lady are busier than ever.

Obviously the jobs have changed, because you don't have to blacken grates and empty slops any more.

But people still want help in the house.

There's a statistic I think The Economist quoted - there are more people in domestic employment now

than there were in Edwardian times.

So this is not a dying world.

This is a growing world.

There are many, many domestic servants around now.

This is an absolutely burgeoning industry.

But these aren't people of the Mrs Bridges and Rose type.

I think that it says something about our blinkered attitude

that we're not willing to entertain a drama about service now

in which everybody would speak English as a second language,

they would be new arrivals to this country

and they would be treated a hell of a lot worse than Mrs Bridges and Rose ever were.

But who is to say that today's stories won't be entertaining us all in the dramas of tomorrow?

As long as there are busy people with money,

they'll get people in to do the things that they need done that they haven't got time to do themselves,

but again, what's wrong with that?

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd