Gordon Jackson was a rock, who, with nothing more than strength of will and a robust Scottish accent, held the 1970s together.
When all around him were Fair Isle jerseys and flared pants, Stevie Nicks and busy wallpaper featuring multiple shades of orange and beige, Gordon Jackson was all that was trustworthy and decent.
He was the bookend at the finish of that repulsive decade as George Cowley, trying to keep maverick CI5 agents Bodie and Doyle in line as head man in The Professionals.
By gee, that was a terrific show.
At the start of that repugnant, wayward and recalcitrant 10-year time-span, Jackson was all that was stern but caring - Hudson, the butler in Upstairs Downstairs.
Who can forget the time he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by a Supporting Actor for the episode The Beastly Hun?
I can't, but someone will.
Upstairs Downstairs, of course, was a terribly popular British drama television series, which ran 68 episodes from 1971 to 1975.
Set in a large townhouse in early 20th-century Belgravia in London, the series depicted the lives of the servants downstairs and their masters up the top.
There was always something really decent about the folk in Upstairs Downstairs.
The show spoke of a better time when people had morals and knew their place.
All worked for the common good, and a social structure that featured a hegemonic system with inbuilt inequalities of the most brutal type seemed somehow ... somehow ... right.
But these matters do not concern us.
For, joy of joys, Upstairs Downstairs is back.
At 8.30pm Thursday on Prime, Jean Marsh reprises her role as loyal parlour maid Rose Buck, who becomes housekeeper of a re-established household at 165 Eaton Pl for new owners Sir Hallam and Lady Agnes Holland.
Gordon, of course, being sadly deceased, does not.
The first series of three episodes was originally broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2010.
The second series of six episodes was broadcast early this year.
It is really very good.
And yes - as good as Downton Abbey; or at least nearly as good.
Keeley Hawes is suitably haughty as Lady Agnes, trying to find pantry boys "juvenile and grateful for the experience" (read cheap).
In 1936, she and Sir Hallam move into Eaton Pl now empty and run down since the Bellamys from the original show moved on, and meet Rose, who now runs a domestic service agency.
Rose finds memories flooding back when she visits Eaton Pl to a refrain from the original theme music.
Oh the memories.
But there are changes as the years have moved on.
Well worth tuning in to witness them.
- Charles Loughrey
