Upstairs Downstairs is the cosy, familiar type of British drama which has always pleased Australian viewers.
We enjoy this brush with our colonial past, and at the same time appreciate the high production standards the British bring to such ventures. And such is the clarity with which the British caste system is depicted, that we can only sigh with relief that we're not part of such a snob-ridden, socially stratified society.
The first set in this DVD release brought us the initial eight colour episodes on two DVDs (omitting the original black-and-white chapters). Now we're given four DVDs with 13 episodes, at the same price as the earlier release.
This new set contains the prime episodes of the long-running series. The episodes are lively and various, ranging from comedy to drawing room drama, and with fine character delineation and development for a television series of this type.
These are the prime episodes because they introduce the pairing of the two below-stairs servants who were mainly responsible for the inner life of the series - Pauline Collins as Sarah, the pathologically insane young parlour-maid and trainee nanny, and John Alderton as her lover, the amoral Ripley-esque chaffeur Thomas.
After this series, Pauline Collins and John Alderton left the show but stayed in character in a new series of their own, Thomas and Sarah. But this husband-and-wife acting team really hit their straps in the delectable comedy series The Wodehouse Playhouse, which has had DVD release in the States, but awaits release here.
This second DVD volume of Upstairs Downstairs is a worthwhile souvenir of this popular series; it's worth having just for the first coupling of Pauline and John.
This is a uniformly fair transfer to DVD of a television series which was not made with an eye to posterity. The colours and tonal details are passable but not sensational. This is as good or better than we ever saw on our television sets, and if judged against a motion picture yardstick, we would find plenty to complain about. But for a television series of this vintage, the transfer is acceptable and it would be churlish to demand anything more.
The dialogue-driven show is served well by a very clear Dolby Digital mono soundtrack, with no distortion or harshness.
There are no special effects worth noting, and none are needed - wait for Terminator III for those.
This series has many thousands of fans around the world, and the complete series is being avidly collected here, in Britain and in the United States.
Here in Australia we're fortunate to be able to share in the remastering done for the UK release of the series. The American DVD issues, from the normally reliable company A & V, have been greeted by US buyers with derision, as one of the worst transfers of a television series to DVD yet seen, with poor colour, ghosting and jittering images. The Australian transfer, while not brilliant, at least provides acceptable quality viewing.
