Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, has been speaking to the Mail on Sunday, and he's had some interesting things to say about the BBC:
Fellowes says: ‘I have read that we went to the BBC with Downton and were turned down, but it’s not true.
'They were not, they are not, happy with dramas that do not reflect their own political and philosophical viewpoint.
'The great thing about making Downton Abbey with ITV was that they let us get on with it. The BBC wouldn’t have done that.’
Does he mean the BBC is too left-wing to have been sympathetic to the aristocratic Crawley family?
‘I do not want to be labelling in that way, they are just more interventionist. They do seem to live in a rather Seventies bubble.
'They do not seem to see their obligation to reflect the differing viewpoints of the entire population, only the viewpoints of the group of the population of which they approve.
‘I am not sure that is completely just given that the corporation is funded by public money.
'I would not wish to see the BBC become a Tory-supporting organisation instead of a Labour one, but I do think they should find a more polytheistic position than they have at the moment.’
I have been chuckling away at Fellowes' attempts to persuade us the landed classes were generally beneficient in their influence and solicitous of the feelings and ambitions of the servant class! Absolute tosh - but nice to have some right wing tosh served up for a change.
ReplyDeleteWhat's really missing in TV drama (in relation to social history) is anything that has a populist flavour about it. I really have to think back to something ancient like Family At War - several decades ago - to get to something that told a people's narrative in a way that wasn't highly and narrowly ideological i.e. in a way that suggested the ordinary people of this island had their own story to tell.