TV Reviews : ‘House of Eliott’ a Classy Costume Drama on A

If you were an “Upstairs, Downstairs” junkie, you might want to feast on its sequel of sorts: “The House of Eliott,” a sumptuous 12-hour, 10-part BBC dramatic series about two struggling sisters who crash high society in 1920s London.

If the premiere two-hour episode (Sunday at 9 p.m. on cable’s Arts & Entertainment), is any index, co-creators Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, the creative team behind “Upstairs, Downstairs,” have fashioned another winning social tableau of period manners and mores.

Like “Upstairs, Downstairs,” this is also a story of social inequality and wavering mobility but told with considerably more pre-feminist edge. Hostess Marsh, glimmering like a cat, introduces events by noting that “The House of Eliott” “also has its upstairs and its downstairs--class and sex.”

The period tone and visual motif is immediately established with a close-up on a double locket and its gilt-framed visages of the two entitled heroines, the plain-looking Beatrice Eliott (Stella Gonet) and her younger, beautiful sister Evangeline (Louise Lombard).

Far from competing with one another, they are soul mates in survival after the death of their physician father, who has kept them sheltered all their lives and left them virtually penniless.

Uneducated and ill-prepared for the labor market, and shocked to discover that their stuffy father had lived a double life, the two young women hurl themselves into the scruffy, workaday world, only to find their horizons narrowly limited by nannyhood or marriage.

As for matrimony, a Fabian social worker acquaintance (the spirited Francesca Folan) scoffs that “sex and marriage is a man’s game.”

Breaking out of their corseted lives, the sisters, in some of the show’s best scenes, parlay a cozy, homebound skill at designing and making clothes into tantalizing fashion contracts with jaded London society.

The production’s singularly delicious scene is a high-toned jazz party in which the sisters, dressed to the teeth in flapper fashions that would kill (costume design by Joan Wadge), rip up the dance floor to the consternation of their blue-nosed guardian uncle (the wonderfully callow Peter Birch).

Throughout, writer Jill Hyem and director Rodney Bennett dramatize the separate but parallel adventures of the sisters with a simultaneity of action that nicely compresses the narrative.

Among the flavorful supporting roles are an imperial old woman (the arch Jean Anderson) leveling a withering eye at a domestic applicant and a jocular portrait photographer (the brash Aden Gillett) blandishing the smitten Lombard until she finds him indelicately wrapped around a party girl with the irresistible name of Daphne Haycock (Kelly Hunter).

This is home turf for the BBC. As the plucky Eliotts who carve out a house of fashion, the brunette, innocent Lombard and the blond, determined Gonet brightly fill female role models who appear ready to take London by storm at the fade-out, foreshadowing nine more Sundays--if the quality keeps up--of classy costume drama.