 Starring: Jeremy Iron, Anthony Andrews, Laurence Olivier, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud
Director: Michael Lindsay Hogg, Charles Sturridge
Year Of Release: 1981
Plot: Middle-class but not particularly wealthy young man Charles Ryder meets the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte as an undergraduate at Oxford. They soon become firm friends, with Charles being introduced into Sebastian’s life of drinking and partying, as well as his ancestral home, the enormous Brideshead. However while they grow ever closer, Charles starts to realise how troubled Sebastian is when he slowly begins to descend into ever worsening alcoholism. |
Do you know why there are so many period drama on British TV? It’s not just because they’re fairly popular, but because in the international television market, they are one of our biggest exports. UK adaptations of classic novels and historical dramas are sold all over the world, ensuring they’re very profitable for whichever companies make them. On its early 80s release, Brideshead Revisited was a major hit, not only winning seven BAFTAs in the UK, but an Emmy and two Golden Globes in the US, and remains one of the most famous mini-series ever made anywhere in the world. It is absolutely wonderfully wonderful and much better than the recent film version, which was more like a plot summary than a movie.
However there’s a problem with this. These period dramas about posh people running around in natty costumes may be very good and popular, but as they’re only of the only bits of British television most people around the world ever see, it’s difficult not to worry that they give a rather skewed perspective of British life, and that people in other countries end up thinking that we all live in vast palatial mansions, where we spend all our time hunting foxes and not expressing our deeply felt emotions. In Brideshead Revisited you even have Charles Ryder presented is if he’s the most typical, common sort of early 20th Century Brit, even though he’s actually rather posh and comes from a relatively well-to-do family who live in an large town house and have servants. When these series start presenting the middle class as the paupers, you really do have to worry what others will think.
You may think I’m worrying about nothing, but I don’t think I am. I lived in the States for a while, and while most people over the pond realised that these period dramas weren’t a real reflection of British life – or at least modern British life – I really did get the impression that quite a lot of people did get their ideas about the UK from these olde worlde dramas. The problem was compounded by the fact that the only other British TV anyone seemed to know over there (if they knew anything) were insanely middle class comedies and murder mystery shows. For some reason when I was there, Keeping Up Appearances seemed to be a lot of American’s only view into British life, which eventually started to make me cringe. As a Brit, I watched it and understood how it made fun of the British class system, but did people in other countries think this was what the UK was really like, and that we therefore have a candlelight supper every evening?
It’s odd because in Britain, the most popular programmes, like Eastenders and Coronation Street, are rather working class and about pretty ‘normal’ people (well, what they get up to isn’t normal, but the world they live in is), but these aren’t the programmes that have had big international success. Nope, if you go to the States, if you see any British TV it’ll be things like Miss Marple, Midsomer Murders, or somebody running around in a corset.
After a while in the US, it really did start to be a bit embarrassing, because of the skewed perspective it was instilling in our American cousins. This reached a crescendo when I was in a university class and someone started getting quite angry about the fact a documentary had a British person narrating it. To them it seemed a clear attempt try and make the documentary seem more authoritative by having a posh British person doing the voiceover.
To be honest I could sort of see what he meant, because there are quite a few documentaries that get shown in the States that have a British person doing the voiceover for no apparent reason, and it does seem to be because of the impression that if you say something in a British accent, it will magically sound more classy, serious and convincing. However in this case his argument was rather undermined by the fact that he didn’t seem to get that it was a British documentary, made for British TV by British people, and it has just happened to be shown in the US. To him it was Britain still trying to be rather patriarchal and colonial by talking down to Americans, and it didn’t even seem to cross his mind that the makers probably hadn’t even thought about anyone outside the UK seeing it when they chose who would do the voiceover. But that’s what I mean, we Brits do seem to have exported a rather strange view of ourselves to other countries.
Of course the UK isn’t the only country that has this problem with skewed perspectives, as once a nation becomes known for a particular thing in TV or film, that tends to be the only thing anyone sees overseas). In the UK, our ideas of what Australia is like is probably far too informed by the likes of Home & Away and Neighbours, as that’s mostly what we see from the country. It’s the same reason that I’d never go to Hong Kong, because as soon as you get off the plane, there’s bound to be enormous martial arts fights going on wherever you look, and I can’t be bothered with the hassle. Even with American TV, while we get an awful lot of it, most mainstream US television presents things from the viewpoint of white, middle class people in cities/suburbs. Few other people get a look-in.
All that said, the UK is in a fortunate position that we can make programmes that can be sold around the world, and it ensures that even if the series that do make it overseas aren’t exactly representative of British life, at least our TV has a bit of a presence elsewhere to remind people we exist. It’s not like it’s a favour we return to most other countries, unless they speak or make programmes in English. However it would be nice if maybe we could sit some of our American cousins down in front of a more varied diet of British TV, just to ensure no one is under the impression we all stiffen our lips as we wander round our mansions, while investigating murders in hideously middle class parts of leafy rural England. After all, we only do that on Tuesdays, the rest of the time we’re being repressed and not telling people we’re in love with them.
TIM ISAAC
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