It was a movie, a TV show or a miniseries. I saw it in the early 1980s, but it could have been produced earlier. Scene is a group of well-to-do women having tea in the parlor. A maid rushes in, without having been summoned, which of course means either she’s about to get canned, or something terrible has happened. It’s the second option.
“If you please, m’am…The Queen…the pore ole Queen…She’s dead, m’am!” Followed immediately by what had to have been genuine 16mm film of Queen Victoria’s funeral.
Sound familiar? All the talk about what the royal sprog will be named reminded me of this. Upstairs/Downstairs can be ruled out, because that starts in 1905, and Victoria died in 1901. I think what I saw was in color, but not necessarily vivid color. It could have been desaturated, like Duchess of Duke Street was, to give it an old-tyme look. It could have been DoDS, come to that, because that starts in 1900. All I’m sure of is the dialogue. Anyone care to speculate?
It sounds like the original version of the Forsyte Saga, which aired on the BBC in 1969. They used real archival footage of Victoria’s funeral procession in one episode. The series was in black and white, so the old film merged in pretty well and just looked a little grainy.
However, IIRC, the scene where the maid bursts in wasn’t to announce the queen’s death, but that Mafeking was relieved. I don’t remember the lines you quote above, but I have the series on DVD and can look at it to check.
I’ve watched this episode now–it’s “The Birth of a Forsyte.” You did remember it just as it happened. Various elderly Forsyte ladies are sitting and having their tea, discussing the end of the Boer War and the newspaper announcements about the marriages of Jolyon/Irene and Soames/Annette, when Smithers the maid bursts in and says the lines about the poor old queen being dead. Cut to archival funeral footage.
The bit about Mafeking I was thinking of happens earlier.
It really is rather wonderful. Little half-remembered things that used to drive a person crazy, no longer have that effect.
Years ago (pre-common-Internet-availability) my sister and I spent MONTHS trying to figure out who Albert Brooks’ show-biz brother was. We kept asking each other, “Steve Guttenberg?..no, that’s not it…WHO is it???”
(It was Bob Einstein, by the way. But we couldn’t find any reference materials that would have told us that with the minimal effort we were willing to put in.:rolleyes:)
Yes, he’s worked more offscreen (as an Emmy-award winning writer, for instance) than on, really–making for that “I can’t quite think of the person” situation that used to plague us all before easy Internet searches became possible.