Word: pbs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nearly a century after his death, Trollope is more popular than ever. The Pallisers, the 22-part PBS television series based on his political novels, has received almost universal praise from the critics, and has won a devoted, sometimes even fanatical, audience. In Manhattan, liquor store dealers have been startled by a sudden demand for a liqueur called orange Curaçao. The reason can now be told: it was the favorite drink of Trollope's crusty old Duke of Omnium. Oxford University Press, which publishes the six Palliser volumes, quickly cleaned out its stock after the TV program...
Trollope and his Pallisers were merely the vanguard of a Victorian invasion of the small U.S. screen. This week the Public Broadcasting Service begins a four-part series based on Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Another Dickens novel. Our Mutual Friend, will be presented on PBS next fall, and before the year is out the network plans a serialized biography of the author...
Except for an understandable overflow of sentiment, the final episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, PBS's blue-chip 'British import, was of a piece with its predecessors. There was the titillating peek into the ways of conspicuous consumption: among other extravagances, the recipe for Georgina's four-tiered wedding cake calls for 16 pounds of currants. There was the history bulletin: Hudson snaps shut his newspaper (the time is 1930) and announces that two million Englishmen are unemployed. There was the subtle reminder that no servant is a heroine to her mistress: in an unusual fit of garrulity...
Upstairs, Downstairs has been a class act-in both senses of the term. Handsomely produced, crisply directed and intelligently written, the program substituted warmth and nuance for the pomp and circumstance of most historical chronicles. The accomplished players (many of whom reassembled in Boston over the weekend for a PBS fundraising celebration) wore their period costumes like second skins. They became what they acted, and learned how convincing their performances were. David Langton (Richard Bellamy) has been accosted on London streets with inquiries about his TV family's health. Simon Williams (James Bellamy) was once challenged...
Lady Glencora, played by a dazzling Susan Hampshire, is the dominating character of The Pallisers, a 22-part British-made series based on Trollope's political novels; it begins next Monday, Jan. 31 (9 p.m. E.S.T.), on PBS. Hampshire is only one of many reasons to watch The Pallisers. In the grand tradition of The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs, the series is elegant, historical soap opera, complete with duels, lecherous dukes, love lost and found, intrigue in the Houses of Parliament, exquisitely smart costumes and roman tic settings amid the topiary...