Eileen Atkins hates to fly, but there's one mile-high trip she's glad she braved. The veteran British actress visited Los Angeles in 2008 to promote her role in the miniseries "Cranford," which would lead to an Emmy win. On the all-night flight back to London, publicists paired her with "Cranford" writer Heidi Thomas so that "we couldn't bore anybody else to death," she said.
It was during that journey that Thomas suggested a return to a much-heralded series that Atkins co-created 40 years ago with gal pal Jean Marsh, riveting audiences on both sides of the pond.
"Upstairs Downstairs," which lasted five seasons and netted three Emmys for best drama, was an unlikely smash, managing to depict both English aristocrats and their servants as three-dimensional characters.
Few gave it much of a chance. It was considered a vanity project for the two actresses. Marsh went on to play Rose, the ever-reliable maid, but Atkins had to bow out of her role as Rose's flamboyant roommate because she was playing Queen Victoria on stage when the series finally got a green light. British executives were so underwhelmed by the pilot episode that the master tapes collected dust for almost a year before airing. Even then, the show seemed cursed by scant promotion and a technicians' strike that caused early episodes to be broadcast in black-and-white.
When London Weekend Television shopped it stateside, PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre," which was just getting started, passed before finally relenting.
"It wasn't an adaptation of a classic," said "Masterpiece" producer Rebecca Eaton. "It was considered a soap opera, just lowbrow television."
But "Upstairs" was anything but lowbrow, and viewers immediately understood they were witnessing some of the most daring drama on the air. I recently went back and devoured the first 20 episodes, which -- though set in the early 20th century -- took on such topics as public nudity, homosexuality, mental illness, suicide, rape, murder, May-December romances and prison abuse.
Pretty heady stuff for the early 1970s -- or not. It's no coincidence that "All in the Family," in which an unapologetic bigot presided from his easy chair, and "M*A*S*H", an anti-Vietnam War sitcom disguised as an anti-Korean War sitcom, both were launched around the same time.