I loved watching Upstairs, Downstairs with my gran in the 1970’s. Class, war, Royalty, suffragettes, sex scandals, good manners, beastly foreigners, great clothes and Edwardian London all made it a must see in our house on Sunday evenings. Did you know Fay Weldon wrote a lot of the scripts? Anyway, while rooting around in some old U,D websites I came across an episode called ‘A Suitable Marriage’ in which Alfred the footman fell in love with a German aristocrat called, wait for it, Baron von Rimmer!

I don’t know how this episode got past my finely tuned gaydar (even at the age of 10 I was scanning the TV for signs of ‘family’) and this show even had an afternoon repeat a few years later without any of the storyline being cut. However, the homosexual fling was deemed too controversial for American TV and this episode was deleted from the schedules when Upstairs, Downstairs aired in the late 70’s. I think I have my first DVD box-set request for Santa.


UPDATE: Fuck Santa! I just bought the first series of Upstairs, Downstairs on DVD (2 disc box set) for £6!