You may remember Upstairs, Downstairs, the much-loved British television series about masters and servants in the Edwardian age, when collars and upper lips were equally stiff and class barriers as rigidly immobile as women's hair.
Now, the series has been updated by the BBC and PBS, plopped like a gaudy bauble in the middle of a very bleak midwinter (it will air in North America this spring). The new Upstairs, Downstairs is set in 1936 - the last time, you may remember, there was such a kerfuffle about a British prince's love for a "commoner."
After the screening, I asked Heidi Thomas, the show's writer, what the renewed interest in programs such as Upstairs, Downstairs said about the way the class system has changed in a country where it remains a constant obsession. She responded with an anecdote about Barbara Cartland, the late romance novelist who looked like a giant pink meringue sprung to life:
"Dame Barbara was asked by a journalist if the class system had broken down and she said, 'Of course it has, or I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you.'"
This was greeted with a roar of laughter by audience members because, as well as being amusing, Dame Barbara had provided a fantasy as rich as any of her books. The people in that audience live in a city and a country governed by men who went to Eton, yet to get to the screening, they might well have walked past the Treasury building, where rioting students, afraid that the "have not" barrier is about to come down permanently, spray-painted "Make the Rich Pay" on the walls.
"It matters more who your parents are in Britain than in many other countries," the National Equality Panel says in its report on a study showing growing wealth disparity in the country.
But it's not Britain's problem alone, even if its young people are currently making the loudest noise. A study published in Toronto this week showed the city becoming polarized, with growing pockets of high- and low-income earners and a dwindling middle class in between. And as Timothy Noah notes with dry understatement in The Great Divergence, his exhaustive series in Slate this fall, "It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality."
In Britain, these divisions just get a more thrilling backdrop. It's like all of London is about to become the set of a play called Class Warfare. The student demonstrators were protesting against a drastic hike in university tuition fees made possible by the flip-flopping of a politician, Nick Clegg, who had gone to an expensive private school. Yes, some of the protesters were just out for a night of mayhem, but there were also poor kids complaining about the cutting of the Education Maintenance Allowance, a meagre £30 ($47) a week, which the government has deemed too expensive. A government composed of MPs who expense the cleaning of their moats and probably look at $47 as the price of a nice claret.
Some of the protesters set upon the car carrying Prince Charles and Camilla, which provided astonishing pictures even for people who aren't students of history. A "baying mob," in the delightfully unironic phrase of one newspaper, surrounded the Rolls-Royce carrying two richly dressed members of the Royal Family, one of whom was bright with jewels. From the crowd there were shouts of "Off with their heads." A protester apparently poked Camilla with a stick. The look on her face in that famous photograph - shock that loyal subjects had turned so quickly - told the whole story. With all the hysteria, you'd think they were riding in a creaking tumbrel down Regent Street while the sans-culottes threw rotten tomatoes at them.
Yet, even as the bottom falls out for the bottom-dwellers, there's an astonishing rise in what can only be called toffstalgia: Downton Abbey, a television drama about an aristocratic family trying to hang on to its estate, was the most popular TV drama in years. The international appeal of The King's Speech, with its sepia-tinted portrait of the imperilled and stuttering ruling class, shows the enduring entertainment value of a fox stole and a cut-glass accent.
Toffstalgia even has an economic benefit: The china manufacturer Portmeirion has just announced a surge in its stock price, thanks to demand for royal wedding crockery. Maybe they'll make a false consciousness biscuit for dunking in tea.
Next up are the perfumed peers and sassy maids of Upstairs, Downstairs. When it aired in the 1970s, Britain was an economic basket case, with high unemployment, energy rationing and civil unrest on the horizon. The show was a huge hit then, and I'm sure the remake will be as well - it's terrifically entertaining. Best to watch with the curtains closed, though, in case there's anything distasteful in the street.