When times are uncertain and unstable, escapist entertainment supposedly increases in popularity, along with narratives of increased social order. The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz was a benchmark film for a nation that narrowly avoided a right-wing military coup six years earlier. The fascist bug had greater success in Depression-wracked Europe, courtesy of a failed painter who managed to wreck the brush mustache for every guy thereafter.
----
Downton Abbey didn't just jump the shark; it hurdled the entire aquarium. The second season featured tropes better suited to Carol Burnett's old soap parody, "As the Stomach Turns." Was the wounded soldier bandaged up like the Elephant Man really a long-lost Crawley cousin, in recovery from an extended bout of amnesia? Could the war-crippled Downton heir Matthew pin his hopes on the twinge in his paralyzed legs? Weirdly, the series made you care even as you hated yourself for it.
Downton Abbey's hereditary aristocracy gets along famously with their anthill minions labouring in the kitchens and stables, with only a few notable exceptions. Honour and respect inform the master/servant dynamic. But according to British historian A.N. Wilson, most of the servants of the era worked in drudgery worthy of Asian sweatshops. Wilson set off a tempest in a Twitter feed a few weeks back when he branded the series "bullshit" and a "sanitized version of the past" on Radio 4. He observed that the life expectancy of the British working class, including servants, was lower in Edwardian Britain than the poorest Third World countries today.
"No, these programmes, which supposedly depict life for the upper classes and their good-humoured servants, bear as much relationship to reality as Pirates Of The Caribbean does to the real world of rum, sodomy and the lash of 18th century life at sea," Wilson fulminated in an article in The Daily Mail. A typical hellish day in the life of a scullery maid made Daisy's Downton workload seem like a slacker's paradise.
To which the average Downton viewer might reply, "And your point? It's escapism, dude." Yet a bit more spine in the script would have gone a long way. The antiseptic depiction of war in the trenches, and the romanticism of the human aftermath, seemed somewhere between a Boy Scout jamboree and an ABC Afterschool Special. More than 350,000 British soldiers became casualties at the Battle of the Somme alone-60,000 on the first day.
The killing fields of the First World War were the result of mixing 20th technology with 19th century battlefield techniques. In his 1989 masterpiece Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, historian Modris Eksteins writes: "Conformity, complacency, and even smugness were far more firmly established in Britain than in France, let alone Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, or Russia. In values and judgments on issues of decency, the family, social and political order, and religion, the Edwardians were extension of the Victorians." The Great War put a big dent in Britain's caste-like social arrangement-mostly by killing off the servant class in huge numbers-but it didn't overturn it.
There's no need for Canadians to feel nostalgic about a time when class divisions and income disparities were lifelong and deep, considering the direction we're going in the Anglo-American world. In some areas of the U.S. and Britain, real unemployment among the young is approaching Depression-era levels, while income gaps have reached indices not seen since the Gilded Age. Canada's future is hardly assured under our program-slashing Tory overlords. Where will some of the surplus labour end up, if not as domestic help in the estates and McMansions of superstar CEOs, athletes and app makers?
Oh never mind; the BBC controller has reportedly ordered up six new episodes of the retooled servant/master series, Upstairs Downstairs. Prepare the popcorn, Jeeves.
www.olscribbler.wordpress.com
