From: tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au (Tonio Loewald)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.uk,rec.arts.tv
Subject: (WS) House of Eliott: Interview with Jean Marsh
Date: 11 Jan 93 02:02:30 GMT
Organization: Australian National University
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12

For all those fans of _The House of Eliott_, here is an
interview with co-creator Jean Marsh that was in one of
our local newspapers just before Christmas last year.  
I'm posting it now, because most people will be back
from New Year holidays.

nb. _The Age_ is a Melbourne newspaper.
    The ABC is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
 
_The Age_ Green Guide, Thursday 10 December 1992 p. 5
 
Sisters' struggle shows seeds of feminism
 
--
'The House of Eliott', a handsome new class drama to be 
screened on the ABC, considers the struggle of British
women through the transitionary 1920's.  
ELISABETH LOPEZ speaks with co-creator Jean Marsh. 
--
 
Downward mobility has broken through class ranks now, but 
in the London of the 1920s a name like Beatrice or Evangeline
and the breeding to go with it would have been 
regarded as sufficient insulation against the need to 
know about the sordid things on the finance pages.
  _The House of Eliott_, a new series by the creators of 
_Upstairs Downstairs_, looks at what happens to two such 
young misses when their father dies, leaving an 
unexpected trail of debts.  Reared to be useless, pretty, 
and above all, wives, 30-year old Beatrice and her 18- 
year old sister Evangeline are left helpless.  Their 
dreams of putting on Russian cigarettes as they hold 
court in Latin Quarter go bung.
  The BBC series is going into its third production series 
and co-creator Jean Marsh says it poached Olympics 
viewers when it went to air in the US on the Arts and 
Entertainment Network.  Marsh finds Americans' 
fascination with the English class system - _Upstairs 
Downstairs_ won three Emmy awards - puzzling, but thinks 
it might reflect a general harking for the years of order, 
when everyone had a place..
  She says critics there received _The House of Eliott_ 
well because "when something like that is done with more 
care and the people are real, then you're permitted to 
enjoy it.  It's a comfy, cosy thing to watch, but you don't 
have to despise yourself".
  _The House of Eliott_ focuses as much on the trappings 
of the 1920s - the clothes that Marsh and [Eileen] Atkins 
love - as much on the internal lives of the two women, as 
they uncover the family secrets that have resulted in the 
penury.  After working odd jobs, they strike out on their 
own as dressmakers, Beatrice (and perhaps less so 
Evangeline) have a resolve and an extraordinary insight 
into the situation that suggests a drama such as _The 
House of Eliott_ may not have been possible 15 or 20 
years ago.
  Maybe uneducated, middle-class women in the 1920s were 
this good at articulating their lot.  Or are Beatrice and 
Evangeline, at the heart of it, the contemporary 
creations of script writers who have lived through the 
"third wave" of feminism and psychologists' discovery of 
family dynamics?
  "It's like thinking we invented sex," Marsh says.  "We call 
it a word now, but feminism has always been around.  What 
were the suffragists but feminists?"
  "I think that Beatrice and Evangeline have got definite 
backbone.  I think you'll see they had an interesting 
mother who had an influence on Beatrice, who passes it on 
to Evangeline."
 
It seems Marsh and writing partner Eileen Atkins have 
toughened up their act considerably since _Upstairs 
Downstairs_.  Marsh said that the only creative input she 
had in that series after their initial  treatment was sold 
to the BBC was in her role as Rose, the head parlourmaid.
  However, with _The House of Eliott_, Marsh and Atkins 
attended rehearsals and submitted storylines in the first 
series.  Their participation was "resisted" in the second 
series and the issue of control remains a source of 
tensions, although relations are more amicable now.  
Marsh and Atkins have been invited to take a more active 
role in the third series, which Marsh points out is their 
legal right.
  They are still working with the producer who denied the 
show's very obvious feminist slant, saying his job was "to 
please viewers by presenting them something not filled 
with issues they've found their screens loaded with every 
day.  This series is about straightforward human 
relationships".
  "We disagree with him absolutely," says Marsh from her 
Oxfordshire cottage.  "But that's fine.  He does it well, 
and it's up to us to fight for what we believe in too.  I 
think he's right to make it more attractive, but I think 
we're right to show social things of the time.  Eileen and I 
have always had in mind that against what would be the 
frivolous, superficial main story of the women getting 
successful making dresses, there's the background of the 
horrendous time in England - unemployment very much like 
today."
 
The series is set in one of the most interesting periods 
of transition for women this century.  Marsh believes that 
more than the suffragists, World War I changed women's lot 
because they were at last required to do what was 
formerly men's work on the home front.
  This development, though, has hardly touched Beatrice 
and Evangeline.  However, Evangeline is befriended by the 
chipper, trouser-clad Penelope Maddox, who compares 
marriage to slavery, works tireless for charity, and is an 
ardent campaigner for contraception.  Penelope's brother, 
the rakish photographer Jack, teases her about her 
causes: "Is this one for emancipated vagrants or homeless 
feminists", and says their childhood home "was full of 
reformists and Pankhursts... put me off politics for life."
  "She's one of our favourite characters," Marsh says.  
"Unfortunately, the producers got rid of her in the second 
series, much against our wishes.  She goes off as a sort 
of missionary."
  The ABC does not have the rights to the second series, 
in which the politics heats up with the 1926 general 
strike.  Marsh, who was brought up working class during 
World War II and took up acting as "a way out", is 
contemptuous of the way the wealthy comported 
themselves.  "Their total lack of shame about displaying 
their richness and the lack of consideration for people 
out of work.  I think the breaking of the great strike is 
one of the most disgusting things the middle and upper 
class have done in England".
  The premise of the show, Marsh explains, was her and 
Atkins' (sic) feeling that they should stop feeling 
sorry for themselves, "that working-class women of our 
age were being discriminated against, that breaking 
through was so much easier of you were a Redgrave or 
middle-class with an education, and so on."
  Fifty-eight-year-old actress are not the most sought- 
after players, but Marsh is busy with two other BBC 
writing projects, one a sit-com, as well as book on the 
series, to be finished in March.
  "We're both doing pretty well now.  We've both got 
cottages, and we know middle-class women our age who also 
had terrible times.  In England, women weren't necessarily 
educated just because their parents were well born.  In 
the twenties, if there wasn't enough money to educate 
everybody, they didn't educate the brightest and the 
best; they educated the men.
  "There was no consideration about how women would lead 
a life without a husband.  So when Beatrice and 
Evangeline's father dies and leaves no money and no 
education, it was that sort of thing of looking outside 
ourselves."
 
. _The House of Eliott_ premieres on Channel 2, 7.30pm, Sunday.
 
(Photograph)
 
Beatrice (Stella Gonet) and Evangeline Eliott (Louise 
Lombard) are left helpless and in debt on the death of 
their father in 'The House of Eliott'.
--
----------------------------
"Whenever anyone talks about culture,
I reach for my revolver."
-- Hermann Goering

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