Downton Revisited

Forty years ago, A British TV network produced a major TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The show was named after and centred on a family living in a vast stately home. The series was an international smash hit and regularly features on a list of greatest TV shows of all time.

A dozen years ago, the same network brought Downton Abbey into the world. It was also an international smash hit, earning a record 27 Emmy nominations in its first two seasons. That show is also named after and centres on a very large house. (Highclere Castle is the real-life Downton. When asked how many rooms it has, the countess of Carnarvon, whose home it is, says, “I’m not sure. I suppose if you know how many rooms you’ve got, you haven’t got a very big house.” So, there you go, you small-house-owner, you.)

Now obviously, Brits are good at wandering around giant houses in corsets. Quite obviously, the rest of the world likes watching Brits wandering around giant houses in corsets.

That’s hardly an end of the similarities. Both shows had a kind of love for their big house, and for the community and continuity it represented. Both shows made much of their love stories. Both shows had a basic decency to them: a sense that the people at the top, however flawed and fallible, fundamentally wanted to do the right thing.

Yet I think there is one very telling difference between Brideshead and Downton, and one that really does tell us something about our changing cultural landscape. The issue I have in mind is this:

Downton’s interests were essentially romantic, social and psychological. It was happy to ask emotionally searching questions about (say) the Lady Mary / Matthew Crawley relationship. It was perhaps even more nuanced and careful in piecing together the Mr Carson / Mrs Hughes one. The landscape of servants and served in a changing Britain was carefully and intelligently done.

Now, Brideshead was hardly idiotic in psychological terms, but it was strikingly less inquisitive. The most memorable relationship in Brideshead was between Sebastian Flyte (young, beautiful, wealthy, drunk, gay) and the Jeremy Irons character, Charles Ryder. Ryder was young, not as beautiful, infinitely less rich, and infatuated, for sure, but not gay. Was there a struggle for Ryder in this relationship? Well, if there was, it was hardly shown. What underlay that relationship? Why did Ryder fall where others didn’t? The show paid that question very little interest. Why was the gifted Flyte a confirmed drunk? It would be easy to say that being gay in a homophobic age was hard, and surely it was. But we didn’t see Flyte struggle with the issue at all. It wasn’t raised.

Instead, Brideshead presented the relationship of its two central male characters as more or less a done deal – “it just is”. Flyte’s challenges weren’t analysed. They just were. Neither the book nor the show made any real attempt to provide an explanatory architecture behind those things.

Instead of psychology, Brideshead placed something else at its very centre: God. Or perhaps not God exactly, but morality, honour, soul, religion – a broader and deeper sense of the Good than anything Downton cared to offer.

Indeed, the story at the heart of Brideshead is, in today’s terms, almost perplexing. Without giving away too much, Brideshead turns on the fact that Mr X loves Ms Y, and Ms Y loves Mr X, and there is no earthly reason why they shouldn’t live together and be happy forever – except that God says no. The result is that both parties end up renouncing their happiness for essentially religious reasons – and one of the two wasn’t even religious.

You could perfectly well imagine some story like that appearing on Netflix today. You could imagine scripting, for example, a drama about a romance in the New York orthodox Jewish community, in which the two principals refused to marry for essentially similar reasons. But that Netflix drama would inevitably focus on the psychology lying behind that refusal. (Parental pressure? Fear of commitment? Fear of exclusion?) Brideshead doesn’t give a damn about the psychology. What it takes seriously was the religious morality lying behind its refusal.

If you want to characterise the shift that’s taken place, it’s from soul/morality to psychology.

And no, I don’t mean that there weren’t psychologically focused and highly intelligent dramas before Brideshead. And no, I don’t mean that there aren’t any soul-focused dramas now. But for all that, I think the shift is a real one. We now have a tendency to think that psychological exploration just IS the point of higher-end fiction.

And it isn’t. It’s one possible purpose of higher-end fiction. There are others.

In my own fiction? Well, I don’t know. Mostly, I just like writing the best entertainment I can. But on that soul versus psychology issue? Well, I probably lean as much towards soul as I do towards psychology.

Soul may not be a fashionable theme, but Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and the rest are beyond fashion. They’re forever.

And Brideshead vs Downton? Brideshead is better.

Til soon.

Harry