Interesting article by Nick Cohen. Well, the interesting bit for me was the comparison of history and therefore class attitudes in Britain and elsewhere in the world, rather than the bits about Downton Abbey (which I haven't seen), most of which I clipped out.
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Different Class
Nick Cohen
Standpoint Magazine - November 2010
Britain, the only country in Europe with an electorate that would tolerate a return of the old ruling class to power, is also the only European country where a TV company could produce Downton Abbey. To the surprise of the critics, but not of those who have noticed that the National Trust has two million more members than all the political parties combined, this affectionate drama about the ancestors of today's aristocracy has become the hit of the autumn season.
You only have to imagine what a comparable German version set in Prussia in 1912 would have to deal with to grasp how different Britain is from the Continent. Without knowing it, the Junker family would have the weight of the defeat in the First World War, revolution and Weimar, the Nazis, the Second World War and the communist takeover of the East on its shoulders. The series would have to be condemnatory or doom-laden or it would be ridiculous. What applies to German drama applies equally to German politics. However tired Germans become of their stolidly bourgeois Social Democrat and Christian Democrat leaders, they cannot yearn for a return to the values of the old order even for a moment. It's not just that the old order was destroyed in two world wars and three revolutions — a large chunk of Prussia is now in Poland.
The British — or rather the English, for the Scots and the Irish have very different attitudes — can and on occasion do yearn for the values of their traditional rulers because the ruling class was not discredited or destroyed by the 20th century. It did not collaborate with Nazism or flee from communism, but retained its hold on the national imagination. Even my left-wing friends, who loathe the coalition government ideologically, admit to admiring its style. No more poisonous briefings from Charlie Whelan and Ed Balls. Noticeably fewer eye-catching initiatives to generate cheap headlines. After the frenetic ride on which the discredited new establishment of the baby-boomer Left took the country, the British had the option denied to so many others of turning to an old establishment. It has provided us again with a Cabinet of relaxed gentlemen who are slow to anger and slower to panic. In theory, I know the dangers of falling for the allure of aristocratic style. Its superficially attractive manner hides many injustices and hypocrisies. But it is a sign of how we are conditioned by the national culture that although I have tried to dislike the coalition, and will doubtless try harder, I cannot wholly despise it.
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Downton Abbey nods towards the greater conflicts of the period, but only for form's sake. Women characters occasionally allow serious thoughts to trouble their pretty little heads. A chauffeur admits to be being a socialist with a chuckle in his voice. But these moments are fleeting. The plots remain insipid and the characters feebly drawn. This most conservative of dramas is an artistic failure, and its weakness points to wider tensions.
The old ruling class may not have been destroyed, but it is far from loved. We may want to see how an Edwardian kitchen worked, as Downton Abbey allows us to do, and to gawp at stately homes, but we lost the deferential respect for their owners long ago.
Our rulers know it. David Cameron, a descendant of William IV, calls himself Dave. Gideon Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary, changed his name to George. From their efforts to suppress the Bullingdon Club photograph of them wearing tailcoats and sneers, to their ostentatious attacks on the benefits of higher-rate taxpayers, they exhibit a desperate desire to show that the return of the aristocracy does not mean that privileged men will be helping their own kind.
They realise that an appeal to the virtues of hierarchy and noblesse oblige cannot sustain a government. Nor can it sustain a drama.
