Upstairs, Downstairs - Out of Costume - Before Upstairs, Downstairs 1

Who said solicitors are all blood-suckers? Raymond Huntley, who played the Bellamy's legal advisor Sir Geoffrey Dillon, had a long career behind him before Upstairs, Downstairs. One of his early roles was playing Dracula on the London stage in the late Twenties - a role for which he had to provide his own costume!

Raymond "Sir Geoffrey" Huntley in the 1944 morale-boosting war film The Way Ahead. The movie is packed with stalwarts of British cinema of the time including David Niven, Jack Watling, Peter Ustinov and Trevor Howard. In the pictures above you can also see Jimmy Hanley, John "Dad's Army" Laurie, William "Doctor Who" Hartnell, Leslie "Hi-De-Hi" Dwyer, and Stanley Holloway. Click on the picture for a larger version.

Nicola Pagett in Granada's 1968 serial The Caesars. She featured in the last episode as Messalina alongside Freddie Jones as her husband Claudius. The show covers almost identical territory to the BBC's later (and more famous) I, Claudius in 1976 and it's worth noting just how much Derek Jacobi's celebrated later performance as Claudius owes to Freddie Jones. Despite having rather slow opening episodes (a trait shared by its BBC counterpart) the serial doesn't quite deserve its modern-day obscurity. Part of the problem may be that The Caesars was shot in black and white – one of the last period dramas to be made this way – and the surviving copies appear to be rather grotty. Click picture for a larger version.

Can you spot the future UpDown star in this group shot from the early BBC soap The Grove Family? A young Christopher Beeny played Lennie Grove, the trouble-attracting youngster of the family, and is pictured in the back row. The show is credited as "the first continuous television narrative drama [i.e. soap] in Britain" and ran for nearly 150 episodes between April 1954 and June 1957, all (somewhat hair-raisingly) transmitted live. Sadly only two episodes (including the last) still survive, but the series did spin off a cinema film, It's A Great Day, in 1955.

Here is Pauline Collins in the 1965 drama/documentary Secrets Of A Windmill Girl. It follows the adventures of two young girls (played by Collins and April Wilding) who decide to go into burlesque at London's legendary Windmill Theatre. Ironically, the theatre had closed (and been converted into a cinema) just a year before the movie went into production. Click for a bigger version.

In 1967, Pauline Collins played Samantha Briggs in the Doctor Who story, The Faceless Ones. The character had originally been intended to be an regular companion of the Doctor, but Collins didn't want to commit herself to an on-going series at this time and so her character remained confined to this one story.
Of the five episodes of this six-part story that Collins appeared in, sadly only one episode still exists. Click on the above to see a larger version. (NB Pauline returned to Doctor Who - playing Queen Victoria - in the 2006 season).

A couple of years later, in 1969, Collins appeared in The Liver Birds – a BBC sitcom about the life and loves of two single girls living in Liverpool, also starring Polly James. After making a pilot show and four subsequent episodes, the BBC abruptly curtailed the series and Collins departed under something of a cloud.
The reasons given for Collins' vanishing act vary – a "clash of personalities" between the two leads being the most common explanation.
A year or so later the programme was re-launched with Nerys Hughes instead of Collins, and then ran successfully for over 80 episodes, including a 1996 revival series. Subsequently, the Collins episodes were more or less written out of TV history, and relatively few people seem to be aware they were made. All five have been wiped, and only a few pre-filmed location scenes (and the title sequence) from the second episode still remain in the BBC archives.