The Duchess of Duke Street purports to be a biographical mini-series about Louisa Trotter, the Cockney proprietor of a swank hotel in St. James, London. It's a fair little mini-series but it suffers from a common 1970s malady - manipulation of historical fact to make it more sympathetic to the modern viewer.
In this case the manipulation is so vast and so all-encompassing that the narrative has become wholly unrealistic. Worse, this seems to have been done mainly to sell the show to Americans, because every change seems to be designed to make the main character more sympathetic to the average American. Some examples: the real Louisa, Rosa Lewis, was a beautiful middle-class country girl who looked forward to a good job in service at age 12 like every other girl she knew, but in this series Louisa is Cockney, poor, and forced to work in degrading service because of her evil mom. In real life, Rosa was propositioned by a drunken European nobleman but was saved in time by her caring employer, an illustrious countess; here, Louisa's propositioned by a stuck-up English nobleman and she's almost fired by her callous employer, a stuck-up viscountess. (The nobleman also falls in love with her specifically because she says no - and her love turns him into an America-friendly egalitarian - but that's another entire level of unreality.) In real life, Rosa succeeded because of her talent but also because of her connections with the rich and powerful: Louisa works herself almost to death. And in real life Rosa was a woman of her time, class-conscious, unthinkingly racist, and deeply distrustful of what she considered "loose women" (ie. any woman who had sex outside marriage): but Louisa treats everyone the same, whether King or cockney, as long as they treat her fairly, and winks at "true love". Every bit of it, every aspect, is designed to make Louisa and by extension the series more appealing to 1970s American viewers.
That said: the series is brilliantly acted (Gemma Jones almost saves this single-handedly, but all the actors are first-rate), the writing is natural and the dialogue unforced, and many of the back stories are taken from real life (Fred the dog, the "conscie" footman, Merriman) and are really legitimately funny. All of that works, and it's enough to make this worth watching, at least once. But much of the comedy of Rosa Lewis's life as shown in the source text (Daphne Fielding's "The Duchess of Jermyn Street") is lost in the rush to make Louisa America-friendly. It could have been so much better.
In this case the manipulation is so vast and so all-encompassing that the narrative has become wholly unrealistic. Worse, this seems to have been done mainly to sell the show to Americans, because every change seems to be designed to make the main character more sympathetic to the average American. Some examples: the real Louisa, Rosa Lewis, was a beautiful middle-class country girl who looked forward to a good job in service at age 12 like every other girl she knew, but in this series Louisa is Cockney, poor, and forced to work in degrading service because of her evil mom. In real life, Rosa was propositioned by a drunken European nobleman but was saved in time by her caring employer, an illustrious countess; here, Louisa's propositioned by a stuck-up English nobleman and she's almost fired by her callous employer, a stuck-up viscountess. (The nobleman also falls in love with her specifically because she says no - and her love turns him into an America-friendly egalitarian - but that's another entire level of unreality.) In real life, Rosa succeeded because of her talent but also because of her connections with the rich and powerful: Louisa works herself almost to death. And in real life Rosa was a woman of her time, class-conscious, unthinkingly racist, and deeply distrustful of what she considered "loose women" (ie. any woman who had sex outside marriage): but Louisa treats everyone the same, whether King or cockney, as long as they treat her fairly, and winks at "true love". Every bit of it, every aspect, is designed to make Louisa and by extension the series more appealing to 1970s American viewers.
That said: the series is brilliantly acted (Gemma Jones almost saves this single-handedly, but all the actors are first-rate), the writing is natural and the dialogue unforced, and many of the back stories are taken from real life (Fred the dog, the "conscie" footman, Merriman) and are really legitimately funny. All of that works, and it's enough to make this worth watching, at least once. But much of the comedy of Rosa Lewis's life as shown in the source text (Daphne Fielding's "The Duchess of Jermyn Street") is lost in the rush to make Louisa America-friendly. It could have been so much better.