Downton Abbey: Reinventing the British Costume Drama

Abstract

The costume drama has a long and distinguished presence in British television culture. Most histories of television costume drama map the field from the 1950s to the present through a combination of formal and stylistic analysis focusing on key texts and contextual analysis of the institutional determinants that have helped to shape the history of the genre. The early history of costume drama is dominated by the BBC which specialised in the production of classic serials — themselves an inheritance from radio serials — adapted from canonical texts of English literature. The advent of commercial television in the mid-1950s did not challenge the BBC’s cultural monopoly in this field as the ITV network preferred costume adventures shot on film such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–60) rather than the studio-based literary adaptations associated with the BBC. It was in the late 1960s that the costume drama came into its own, however, exemplified by two landmark BBC serials of 1967 — The Forsyte Saga and Vanity Fair — which marked the transition from black-and-white to colour. It was the advent of colour broadcasting that ushered in a golden era for the costume drama in the 1970s with the BBC’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1971), I, Claudius (1976) and Poldark (1977–79) and ITV’s first significant entry into the genre with London Weekend Television’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–75).