ROGER WATSON
One’s outrage is hard to contain. Netflix recently acquired the 2010 BBC re-make of Upstairs Downstairs. The re-make had a very short life of only two seasons due to the success of ITV with Downton Abbey which won the ratings war by a country mile. Even the fragrant Keeley Hawes and a troupe of established actors could not breathe enough life into this new take on the snobbery and social divisions which beset early 20th century London to keep it running.
So, why the outrage? This drama was so clearly and uncompromisingly ‘of its time’ that it made no effort whatsoever to recognise the diverse multicultural society that the United Kingdom has become. For example, there was not a single black actor, nobody was transitioning and the only person of colour to be included was a Sikh gentleman who lived in the house at Eaton Square, serving very little purpose at all.
There was a very short and unexpected outburst of lesbian lust in one episode which many may see as having filled the diversity tick box. But it is notable that both the lesbians were women. This would have been the ideal opportunity – a missed opportunity as it transpires – to have made one of the lesbians a transwoman. Sadly, they stuck to the tired old lesbian script that has been rolled out for years.
I did say above that there were no black actors. Hard to believe, isn’t it? The drama is set in the years immediately before the Second World War, one of the most notoriously monochrome periods ever portrayed on television. This was the very time when black men signed up in their thousands to join the British Armed Forces. In fact, it is a little known fact that the British Armed Forces in World War II were 90% black, many of them black women.
The man of the Upstairs Downstairs house is a member of parliament and very much involved in negotiations with Germany, by then in the hands of the Nazis. The Nazis were even worse. Every single one of them was white. Are we seriously expected to believe that the Third Reich failed to recruit a single person of colour? The words of Humza Yousaf – former First Minister of Scotland – have turned out to be prophetic: ‘Aristocrats…white! Servants…white! Lesbians…white! Soldiers…white! Nazis…White!’
Of course, nothing set in the immediate pre-war period of the 1930s would be complete without mentioning the Jews (who, incidentally, were also all white). The man of the Upstairs Downstairs house and the Sikh gentleman are involved in organising the evacuation of Jewish children from Germany and housing them with British families (all white). The insensitivity of presenting this one-sided view of the history of the Jews without a single mention of the Palestinians, let alone the genocide in Gaza that was about to take place decades later was astonishing.
It is hard to believe that, across the whole of the two series, there was not a single mention of global warming. The aristocrats travelled everywhere by car and there were even a few episodes where politicians were portrayed flying to Berlin and back again. Not once did anyone calculate the carbon footprint of flying to Berlin, nor did a single aristocrat offset his emissions before attempting to prevent another European war. One might have expected a trigger warning at least.
The lady of the Upstairs Downstairs house – played by Keeley Hawes – is pregnant for several episodes. I hope readers of a sensitive disposition are sitting down at this point. She is portrayed smoking cigarettes and drinking sherry. Modern viewers should at least have been offered counselling, a trigger warning and the telephone number of a specialist psychiatrist before such scenes were broadcast. She eventually gives birth and, you probably got there before me, the baby is white.
And there is so much more. The family and the servants in the house all seem to subsist on a meat-based diet. Veganism is not even mentioned as an option or even going vegetarian for a few days of the week. Apparently, in the late 1930s people simply ate what was available. It is almost as if there was not a climate change crisis.
One of the young men downstairs transpires to be handy with his fists and is trained by one of the older servants as a boxer. Toxic masculinity, or what? This would he been the ideal opportunity for some gay man on man action, what with all that stripping off to the waist and being rubbed down after a fight. But no such luck. Someone does try to get fresh with the young boxer but, in a blatant display of homophobia, the young boxer resists his advances.
Readers may have detected that I am not being entirely serious here. The real scandal, of course, is not that Upstairs Downstairs fails to meet the moral expectations of 2026. It is that anyone now thinks it should. We have reached the point where historical drama is no longer expected to portray history, but to rewrite it in accordance with whatever fashionable grievance happens to dominate social media. Netflix, usually the vanguard of woke diversity casting, should for once be congratulated for broadcasting Upstairs Downstairs unexpurgated.
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Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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