Episodes
Upstairs, Downstairs ran for five series from 10 December 1971 to 21 December 1975. The first four series had thirteen episodes each, while the final series had sixteen. Due to an industrial dispute over extra payments for using newly introduced colour equipment, during which broadcasting unions refused to allow their members to use colour cameras, the first six episodes of the first series were shot in black-and-white, and when colour production resumed, the first episode was remade in colour. Two endings were made, which could be shown depending on whether the black and white episodes were broadcast by the channel. The original untransmitted black-and-white version of the first episode is believed to have been wiped.
The opening credits of each episode featured a cartoon from the magazine Punch, and the lettering was drawn by the graphic designer Terry Griffiths. The theme tune was composed by Alexander Faris and entitled The Edwardians. It won an Ivor Novello Award. Part of this tune would be made into the song What Are We Going to Do with Uncle Arthur?, sung by Sarah, with lyrics written by Alfred Shaughnessy. Pauline Collins released this as a single in 1973. The theme tune was also used as the processional march for the church wedding of Elizabeth and Lawrence in series 1, Episode 13: For Love of Love.
Many writers wrote episodes throughout the five series, including Alfred Shaughnessy, John Hawkesworth, Fay Weldon, Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham, John Harrison, Julian Bond, Raymond Bowers, Jeremy Paul, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Anthony Skene and Elizabeth Jane Howard.
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Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)