Under the Bonnet of the Bonnet Drama

This year sees the 40th anniversary of the BBC's biggest international success story - The Onedin Line, the first series they sold worldwide and which is still big in the former Yugoslavia and selling as a DVD box set 40 years later.

Following the fortunes of a mid-19th century Liverpool shipping dynasty as steam ships aka 'floating kettles' begin to overtake sailing ships, this mix of pithy social commentary with riveting storyline devised by former real-life seaman Cyril Abraham kept viewers hooked for ten years from 1971 and formed the seminal Sunday night backdrop of my early childhood with its unforgettable theme tune of Khatchaturian's 'Spartacus'. Watching a couple of series again recently, it has lost none of its power to mesmerise, even if the stock storm footage and sets seem a little more obvious to the more sophisticated eye (and television set).

Prior to The Onedin Line, vicars were previously shocked when entire congregations stayed in to watch The Forsyte Saga every Sunday night in the late 60s and even altered their service patterns to fit in with it.

Since then, Poldark, Upstairs Downstairs, various Dickens, Austen and Conan Doyle adaptations and a myriad of other costume dramas, epic and not so epic, have all taken their turn to enthral us with their vanished values and worlds in our increasingly cynical and moral compassless times.

I for one have relished them all except for some appalling and highly unnecessary remakes of The Forsyte Saga, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House and David Copperfield, among others.
In fact the one thing which annoys me most about costume dramas are the constant re-makes of the same dozen or so most popular titles when there are so many classic books out there which have never even been adapted. George Eliot for example has often been considered too challenging but when the risk was taken and 'Middlemarch' was produced, it was a triumph! Ditto Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Cranford' though perhaps Anthony Trollope is a slightly more acquired taste with his political 'The Way We Live Now' but I feel sure his work would have built a significant following had they taken a risk with more of his books.
'Lark Rise to Candleford' took the novel approach of using up the material from Flora Thompson's original book fairly quickly and then writing lots of new stories using the same characters to spin out half a dozen series. With mixed results I may say, though it still proved as addictive as crack cocaine and a runaway success commercially.

'Downton Abbey' albeit not based on a classic but written by the very much still alive, Julian Fellowes, has proven that our appetite for period drama remains as voracious as ever, critical as we may be that historical details are not as scrupulously poured over as in the past to leave the odd TV aerial in shot in 1913. We may prefer a classless society in real life, but that doesn't necessarily make for good or textural telly.

Another function such dramas undoubtedly serve is to remind us of our Britishness in a modern world where our national identity is increasingly blurred. Which is not to condone the less desirable aspects we have shed, more acknowledge that plenty was also lost which was worth retaining and celebrating such as good manners, concern for one another, community, backbone, moral turpitude and having both a love and a duty to one's country. And as the writer Julian Fellowes points out, not all Lords of the Manor were obnoxious users of the peasantry, many were good and benevolent employers who provided work for the majority of their villages and sponsored welfare and education for the children of their workers, even though this was also in their interests if they wished to run a thriving estate.

The original Upstairs Downstairs and The Onedin Line are notable for how much actual history they wove into their storylines, both social and national, so that viewers were educated as they were alternately affected and entertained by watching their favourite characters go through various difficulties of history and formed more understanding of how their society had evolved.
Studying TV costume drama from the 70s in particular, it seemed that every series had a killer theme tune, dramatic stories, wonderful costumes and memorable characters.

Pundits profess great surprise that the appetite for costume drama remains as unabated as ever But is it really so strange that as old certainties are swept away and challenged, we are more likely to cling on to any vestige of the past and familiar? The past may have been muddy, cold, smelly and often hungry with raging toothache in real life, but the costumes are still wonderful, the architecture beautiful, the moral dilemmas not a million miles from our own and we have the luxury of enjoying top notch storytelling in our cosy centrally-heated homes.