The Upstairs Downstairs spoof has been forgotten in Britain. But in Hungary, kids still name their pets after the cast. Our writer travels to Budapest for the lavish 30th anniversary celebrations

In the restaurant of an upmarket Budapest hotel, three young sisters are overcome with excitement. They have just spotted their comedy heroes through the window and have crept in, hoping for autographs. Rosie, 13, breaks down in tears as she confides the names of her guinea pigs: Teddy, James and Mr Stokes. “They’re all boys,” she says apologetically, but her rabbit is a girl. “She’s called Ivy.”

At a table gleaming with silver and crystal sit the actual Teddy and James – or rather the actors Michael Knowles and Jeffrey Holland. They’re about to tuck into a five-course meal inspired by the British TV series that has made them two of Hungary’s most famous stars. Ivy (Su Pollard) has sent her apologies and Mr Stokes (Paul Shane) is dead. The banquet opens with cream of asparagus soup with roasted lamb’s kidney and ends with tapioca pudding, each with its own accompanying wine – as befits the aristocratic Meldrum family, from the 1920s-set sitcom You Rang M’Lord?

For James, the silver service might have come as a surprise. He was a humble footman in the series. Teddy is to the manor born, the “silly arse” second son, whose nieces Cissy (Catherine Rabett) and Poppy (Susie Brann) are also at the party, along with housemaid Rose (Amanda Bellamy). In the hotel kitchen, chef Áron Barka is feeling the heat as he puts the finishing touches to a platter of tiny cucumber sandwiches. Is he a fan of You Rang, M’Lord? “Of course”, he says. “I know it by heart.”

It’s a refrain that is to be repeated many times over the weekend. It all goes back to 1988, when the TV writer-director duo David Croft and Jimmy Perry devised a comic riposte to Upstairs, Downstairs, using the “family” of actors who had travelled with them through decades of comedy classics, from Dad’s Army to It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and the holiday camp romp Hi-de-Hi!.

After a touch-and-go start, when a technicians’ strike nearly scuppered the pilot episode, a full series was commissioned by the BBC. Though You Rang, M’Lord? didn’t hoover up awards like Croft and Perry’s previous work, its ambitious 50-minute format set a new standard in a sitcom era where the normal running length was half an hour. “David and Jimmy always talked of it as the jewel in their crown,” Knowles and Holland agree. The show ran for 26 episodes over four seasons between 1990 and 1993, making household names of the disreputable Meldrums and their long-suffering staff, whose rise and eventual fall it followed from the first world war trenches to the late 1920s.

And there it might have remained – a risque little mezzanine in the history of upstairs downstairs comedy – except that Hungary, recently liberated from the Soviet Union, couldn’t get enough of it. The first series was dubbed into Hungarian in 1991, by actors who were all stars in their own right. “First came a Brazilian romcom, then Dallas and then You Rang, M’Lord?” says Eniko Marton, whose film director husband bought her a premium ticket for the festivities as a birthday present. “You Rang, M’Lord was the one that stayed with us.”

Thirty years after the pilot went out, not a week goes by without episodes appearing on Hungary’s TV channels. A fan club has nearly 23,000 followers – but as the show’s 30th anniversary came into view, a group of uberfans decided to take it further. They set up a Facebook page and began to track down surviving members of the cast.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I know it by heart’ ... chef Áron Barka and his M’Lord-themed menu. Photograph: Zoltan Marton

A small group, headed by medical researcher Zsuzsanna Polgár, made their first move two years ago, travelling to London for a reunion portrait with some of the actors in front of the grand Victorian villa in London’s Holland Park where the Meldrums were supposed to have lived.

As word spread, more and more fans wanted to get in on the act, so they created a crowdfunding page to fly the cast to Budapest. Within a month they were forced to shut the page down, after being mobbed by 800 people, who pledged between 5,000 and 20,000 forint (£14–£55) for the chance of an audience with their comedy heroes. This in a country where the average monthly wage is just 200,000HUF.

So it is that five British actors find themselves feasting in some of the Hungarian capital’s finest restaurants and being chased through its streets by autograph-hunters. This is all during a hectic timetable of stage and TV appearances, while a national comedy channel runs a 26-hour marathon of all four series through the weekend.

In the queue after the ecstatic live event is young radio journalist Adrienn Csepelyi. “From the 50s, we were taught that aristocracy is something we should forget, that good Hungarians work hard all through their lives to build our great socialist country,” she explains.

“After the change of regime, most Hungarian people just didn’t have any connection with aristocracy. As we have to work hard to earn a living, we are longing to have such English traditions as having five o’clock tea from beautiful china in beautiful houses. But as we just don’t have the chance, we can relate to the humour of Mabel [the elderly charlady, played by Barbara New] and Mr Stokes [Paul Shane’s crooked butler). So we really like both sides but for different reasons I guess.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A packed venue for the crowd-funded Q&A with cast members, where ticket prices reached up to a tenth of an average monthly wage. Photograph: Zoltan Marton

Other fans are more emotional. “Twenty years ago I had cancer,” says 76-year-old Katalin, whose son - a Catholic priest and law professor - has laid on a minibus for a sightseeing tour. “While in chemotherapy, I decided I needed to make sure that every day I laughed. It saved my life.”

“You are a gay icon,” a young man with a buzzcut whispers urgently to 58-year-old mother of two Katie Rabbett, one-time girlfriend of Prince Andrew, who claims to have given television its first lesbian kiss as the boyishly elegant, monocle-wearing Cissy Meldrum.

At the end, the most symbolic of many gifts are doled out: a pink plastic ukulele for Poppy, who is fondly remembered for an instrumental duet rich in double entendre with James (who gets cufflinks). There’s bottle of Air de Paris perfume for upwardly mobile housemaid Rose, and a red-star brooch for Cissy to honour her progressive views. Teddy (a now 81-year-old Michael Knowles) is mystified by the present of a red rubber-ring that may relate to some plot point he has long forgotten. Perhaps, he muses, it’s standing in for a whoopee cushion. But as any true Hungarian fan would assure him, quoting one of the show’s much parroted catchphrases: “Least said, soonest mended.”

This article was amended on 3 October 2018 to make clear that Teddy was Poppy and Cissy’s uncle rather than their brother.