The not-so-secret ways of the British upper classes

I have literally only ever seen the British countryside via a train or airport bus, but I know things.

The above kerfuffle (?) over whether Americans can tell what real posh Europeans are all about has amused me to no end. A photo of a model (?) cosplaying Rich And Parisian, who might well be rich and Parisian but yeah probably not, inspired a whole discourse about what is and isn’t knowable to dimwitted Americans. We often find ourselves trying to spot real British aristocrats, our binoculars out in search of crowns and Burberry, when in fact they all look like Lol, the gardener on As Time Goes By.

The incredible thing about this to me is that… if you watch even a little bit of British television—novels work, too, but visuals help—you are well aware of the shabby-looking aristocrat phenomenon. The nouveau-riche signifiers are flash and brands. The true upper class have muck on them from life on the country estate. It’s like how it was when I was a child in Manhattan, where the really posh kids were the ones who’d been to Walmart because this indicated time spent at second homes, in countryside areas that had these. But in this case, with the muddy upmarket Brits, it’s about not needing to prove anything. You’re not bothering with designer gear if your name is itself name-brand.

You know who misses this? Hyacinth Bucket. She thinks she’ll seem posh if she dresses up and keeps everything tidy, when little does she know, surface-scrubbing is dead common.

I was thinking about this in terms of something else I’m writing/thinking about, regarding the supposed impossibility, for straight people, of knowing what not-straight people think about the straights. When this is known. It is known! Stereotypes, including about privileged categories of humanity, are not state secrets. Something will be covered in heaps of pop culture and then you’re meant to be all, yes, you’re right, I had no idea what people were saying behind closed doors. There will be oblivious Hyacinths missing memos, but anyone marginally plugged-in knows what’s what.

But I also want to discuss the relevant plotline in As Time Goes By, because I’m back on that as a sleeping pill and have thoughts.

As you will doubtless recall, late-middle-aged Lionel Hardcastle, esteemed writer of nothing much but he is a writer and this is very dignified, is gifted a hard castle (a manor house) by his somewhat ancient father, who, when Lionel finds his ‘career’ insufficiently renumerative, buys this grand estate back from him, to help him out financially. There are thus several episodes set at the manor house in question, episodes where the stakes are, even by the standards of this stake-less show, in below-zero territory.

It is a problem for the live-in year-round servant, Mrs. Bale, that Jean, Dame Judi Dench, Lionel’s wife (why did you do this Jean, why?), brings too many provisions from London, not trusting her (Mrs. Bale) to stock the house with proper groceries.

It is a problem that a proper radio station cannot be immediately located on the drive from Jean’s (later Jean and Lionel’s) exquisite parkside London townhouse to the country mansion.

It is a problem that the neighbors are too friendly.

This last one turns out to be as close as it gets to a real problem. For reasons to do with countryside squabbling, some of the irritating, pushy nouveaux hire some thugs to beat up poor Lol. Jean and Lionel come to Lol’s defense, both because it is nasty to beat someone up, and because quite frankly they found this crowd too garish and preferred an understated way of life and didn’t enjoy being asked to barbecues that they (Jean and Lionel) were too British (?) to say no to, despite being grown adults in possession of the ability to speak.

Jean and Lionel think they’ve ostracized themselves by falling out with the crowd, but then learn via Lionel’s mega-posh dad that the real country set—consisting of multigeneration manor owners and the locals who serf for them—hates those people. The real chic are shabby, united in shabbiness across socioeconomic lines. Their shared enemy is the strivers. Lionel and Jean may be cityfolk, but they aren’t fake countryfolk, so they’re all right.

This plotline has always irritated me. Obviously on the specifics, they’re in the right—bad to beat up Lol! But it’s just too convenient that the uncouth nouveau riche set are actually terrible people. It gives the characters and the audience the go-ahead to hate them, and to think anyone who isn’t centuries’ worth of rooted in that bit of land is an enemy.

The show really has it in for anyone who works for a living. Jean’s career-having is treated as compensatory, because she was widowed young and needed… money, maybe, but purpose, is the implication. Lionel’s idleness, sulking on the armchair Jean’s daughter Judy bought him when he moved in, in one of the earlier episodes, is somehow meant to be more charming than Alistair’s handsome go-getter silliness.

This post-aristocratic leisure probably explains the show’s appeal. Nothing matters! Everything is easy. Everyone, even the young characters, looks like a Coastal Grandmother, and every room is neatly painted. Fine, Jean realizes she cannot afford to have a new bathroom put in, in that episode where she’s worried that Lionel will again walk in on Sandy, the other young then less-young woman who semi-mysteriously lives with them, but on the whole, these are people who are vaguely normal and relatable and middle-class and yet they are living as if it’s Downton Abbey where it is not announced that they’re the rich ones.