For ten years now the television series Downton Abbey has been the flagship carrier of international nostalgia. It will be coming to an end next month, no doubt to great lamentation among its 120 million worldwide viewers, and will immediately go into reruns. Fans are already gripped by a kind of preemptive nostalgia at the thought of seeing it all over again. It is a genuine cultural phenomenon. The New York Times even ran a four page special advertising supplement, in case anyone missed the start of the present series…New or recycled historical series are already lining up to fill the gap – including classics like Upstairs Downstairs. In Britain the production of decorative nostalgia is a kind of cottage industry.
Now I have nothing at all against Downton Abbey. It is a superior soap opera, beautifully produced, a work of art in its own way. I watched most of the first series, and quite enjoyed it. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. My grandmother worked as a maid in one of those great houses at the turn of the nineteenth century, and her stories about it were more like Dickens than Downton. It was a cruel world, and a cruel life.
Nostalgia is never about reality. While enjoying these colorful tales we know full well that the past was very much like the present, only worse. But the idea of a golden age is endlessly seductive. Two thousand years ago the Greeks and the Romans looked back with nostalgia to the Age of Heroes. Five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, Europeans looked back to the golden age of the Greeks and Romans, and so it goes. Every nation has its own tales of a glorious past that never really existed. History is a bottomless source of inspiring but unlikely plots, as Shakespeare knew very well. England in the fourteenth century was captivated by ancient and fantastic tales about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. America has the myths of cowboys in the Wild West, although some seem to find the Puritans of New England more appealing. The followers of the Islamic State believe that the tenth century was pretty much ideal.
If we are going to visit the past at all, fiction is the way to do it. In fiction the chaos of life is put into proper narrative order. It makes sense, which it never does at the time. But serious history books are hard work, and the best place experience the reality of the fantasy is on television where we can admire the architecture and the costumes and not get too bogged down in the messy details.
Not all fictional portrayals of the past are warm and fuzzy, of course. Many of them revel in the sheer horror of it, and I haven’t seen an optimistic film about the future since Woody Allen’s Sleeper. If Hollywood is to be believed, the future will be all about apocalypses, barbarism, screaming teenagers, and giant armored vehicles racing across devastated landscapes. If that future ever comes, we will be the golden age.
Who wouldn’t prefer gentle dramas from an imagined past, like Downton Abbey? The series author, Lord Fellowes, seems to be a nice chap. I do hope that he will give his fairy tale a happy ending.
Copyright: David Bouchier.
