I’m watching the Blue Origin all-female space flight as I write this. In fact Lauren Sanchez, who is about to marry one of the richest men in the world, has just said that what the space flight has taught her is that ‘we’re all in this together’.
Moving swiftly on.
While I have many thoughts about this particular hoo-har and the people on board as I’m watching this on the BBC News channel - they’ve just landed back on Texan soil - the caption below the spaceship reads that actress Jean Marsh has died, aged 90.
Jean Marsh didn’t just star in Upstairs, Downstairs, as Cockney housemaid Rose Buck, she co-created and also wrote it. She was the original Shonda Rhimes.
Here she talks about the genesis of the show that ran from 1971 to 1975: “Well, I’d been friends with Eileen [Atkins] for six or seven years when we started talking about it. We came from the same background, a working-class background, and we were thinking idly about trying to create something , maybe a television series, maybe a film, we weren’t quite sure. And the idea gelled through two different experiences: One was watching The Forsyte Saga that was made sometime in the ’60s, and we thought, “Well, that’s all really wonderful, but who washed the clothes? Who ironed them? Who’s cleaning the boots? Who’s doing all the work?” And we thought, “Gosh, it’s so unfair you never see the real workers.” That was one seed. We had chips on our shoulders. And then Eileen found a photograph of her mother with a group of servants standing by a horse-drawn bus for a servants’ outing, so we thought, “Let’s write about downstairs people.”
So they wrote about the downstairs people. And it was a huge hit.
I remember watching the reruns and as a precursor to Downton Abbey, it was a wonderful commentary on the great British class divide.
Class still permeates every aspect of life in the UK, although I definitely feel that there is more representation in terms of who you see on television now.
But in the early Seventies, Upstairs, Downstairs was really the first time that anyone ‘below stairs’ was given an emotional life, a backstory or a character arc.
You think we’d written about everyone in every which way these days but there’s a demographic I’m trying to give a voice to in my novel. Something that’s personal to me, and that I don’t see very often, and for some reason seeing Jean’s name flash across my screen made me momentarily emotional.
This morning, I wrote another 1200 words of my novel. I’m blazing through the writing, and that’s intentional. If I stop to think too much about it all, I’ll get overwhelmed by the sheer number of words and the effort that it’s going to take to bring this baby home.
But in remembering Jean Marsh, who was one of my formative writing heroes, for the fact that she was a woman and she created something so special, I’m going to keep going.
I’m going to write for my downstairs people.
Lisa
I'm glad the obituaries gave Jean the recognition she deserved as an actress but also a creator of one of the great TV series of the 1970s. It seems hard to believe now, but in the 1970s there would have been people in their 80s who remembered that world of the early 1900s.
Glad to hear you're storming along with the novel. Always remember the purpose of the first draft is to exist!