HERITAGE TELLY

It’s Sunday night and the weekend is drawing to a close. You’ve filled the weekend with activity, shopped, entertained, cooked and cleared up. Finally you collapse in front of the TV and relax, knowing that for many of us it’s only a sleep away from the hurly burly of the next working week.

You flick through the channels to see what’s on and inevitably you will find something that I have come to label Heritage Telly.

It’s nothing new, in the 60s it was Dr Finlay’s Case Book and then A Family At War and in between the major producers would dip their toes into the classics with slabs of Dickens, Austen, Trollope and the legendary Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the costume drama against which most are measured.

And we lap it up, the frocks and the shocks, the sugar coated histories and the blood stained ones too. They feed our imagination but they also feed into a store of received knowledge, much of which is fantasised and far from the truth. Of course that is not far removed from the sanitised histories that many of us were force fed in school, the whitewashing of or colonisation. Heritage Telly is of course doing much to re-dress that now with new programmes that dig away at our oppressive presence around the world and set some of that misinformation right, or at least less wrong.

Most recently the biggest slice of HT has to have been Downton Abbey, a sprawling family saga with a stellar cast, beautiful locations and fabulous costumes, and within stories of scandal, coitus outside the walls of marriage, secret trysts and homosexuality! Actually the latter was dealt with fleetingly in an episode of an early HT programme, Upstairs Downstairs. In the fifth episode of series one the visiting Baron Klaus von Rimmer, is revealed to be homosexual when he is caught in flagrante delicto with the footman Alfred who at the end of the episode he whisks away! That was back in 1971, but in the USA wasn’t shown until 1989!

Of course these days TV drama seldom feels complete without a liberal smattering of gay characters and storylines, and for that matter, nor do TV game shows where the previous tokens of race are now matched by token queers.

Downton Abbey went to six series from 2010 to 2015 and then a full length feature film in 2019, and a new one due for release in 2022. Writer Julian Fellowes has undoubtedly done a great job, it’s upstairs and it’s downstairs for sure but with a whole lot more money thrown at it.

Fellowes has now been lured across the pond to create the American Downton in a new series, The Gilded Age, which sees the rivalry in New York of old money and new. It has the full gamut of threads too, race, sexuality, poverty… it’s all there but this time it is larded with money, the sets, locations and costumes are extraordinary and so is the cast, truly stellar and it’s rapidly compulsive viewing too being drip fed to Sky audiences one episode a week.

Back on this side of the Atlantic another series of Call The Midwife has come to an explosive close with a major train crash and Jenny Agutter injured. Jenny Agutter as Mother Superior, for my generation it’s hard not to picture her waving her scarlet bloomers in Lionel Jeffries legendary The Railway Children, and even more of a stretch  if you caught her skinny dipping in Nicholas Roeg’s brilliant Walkabout – nothing nun-like in that for sure.

The genre is as popular as ever, we seem to pant for our Poldarks and bay for our Bridgertons. The costume drama, is escapism, a breath of relief from the reality of current world news and dare I suggest it, a place for aging actors to find worthwhile employment when the producers of soaps, or as they like to label themselves “Ongoing Drama”, continue with their obsession with youth and teenage angst.

Period or costume drama, heritage telly, call it what you will, we crave it and we lap it up.

Andrew Kay



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