Class barriers are tumbling at the Bellamys'. Lady Marjorie is hardly dead in the Titanic disaster, and ne'er-do-well Son James is planning to marry his father's typist. Upstairs is distraught; downstairs, aghast. Pale green eyes narrowing in her pretty vixen's mask, head Houseparlormaid Rose Buck voices the general anxiety: "A stranger has been in my linen closet. I don't know if I'm still wanted here."
Rose's fear is enough to strike dread into the Bellamys, who know their patrician comfort depends on a skilled corps of servants. Eaton Place may be home to the Bellamys, but it belongs to their servants: Mr. Hudson, Mrs. Bridges, Footman Edward and, of course, Rose, whom Actress Jean Marsh has made into the most fetching cockney sparrow since George Bernard Shaw detached a rib called Eliza Doolittle.
Marsh is in fact responsible for some far-reaching social commotion. Upstairs, Downstairs, the show she created with Actress Eileen Atkins, is in its fourth season on English TV and its second on PBS. It now has 50 million fans round the world. A Broadway musical is planned. CBS has bought the show's U.S. rights, and plans to transpose the location to a 1920s Boston family's Beacon Hill house with a black male "Mr. Bridges" at the range.
Bottoms Pinched. Not 'arf bad for a series dreamed up over a casual Sunday lunch during which Marsh and Atkins discovered they both had parents who had been "in service." They were sick of seeing servants portrayed as scene transitions: "You know, 'here's your hat, sir,' or having their bottoms pinched." Neither woman did anything to rectify the situation until a year later, when an actress boasted to Jean that she had landed a plum part. "I was furiously jealous," says Jean, who immediately called a producer friend. "What do I do with an idea for a TV series?" she asked. "You bring it to me," was his reply.
The outline for the first series was based partly on the stories of Eileen's parents, an underbutler and a needlewoman in the Edwardian era, and partly by Jean's reading preferences. She wanted the servants to talk with the uncontaminated candor of Ivy Compton-Burnett's oracular children. The close, conspiratorial relationship between Rose and Sarah, the rebel maid, was inspired by the two maids in Henry Green's novel Loving (belowstairs in a country house). Remembering how one of those maids found her mistress in bed with a lover, Jean says: "I always wanted to walk in on Lady Marjorie like that and scream: 'Ow, she's in bed with the wrong man!' " That line never got spoken. Instead, Jean based much of the cockney dialogue on her mother's pungent expressions.
Neither actress wanted a role within the Bellamy family. Eileen wanted to play Sarah to Jean's Rose, but stage commitments got in the way. Jean admits to a little jealousy of the fame won by Sarah (Pauline Collins) in England, but Rose's enigmatic quality was more successful in America. Says Jean: "She wants more but doesn't know what."